Comment by waselighis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by waselighis | Hacker News Reader

I think Reddit is headed down the same path as Twitter, it's not going to die, but it will be less popular and less relevant. The most popular subreddits appeal to a broad/general audience that doesn't care much about API access or moderation tools. That is, the average user who is there just for the memes and doom scrolling the latest news. It's these popular subreddits that will continue to drive traffic, serve ad impressions, and keep the site alive for the foreseeable future. It's the niche special interest subreddits that are going to suffer the greatest.

Jellyfin recently launched their own forum a week ago in response to the Reddit turmoil. I expect to see this happening more, as distrust in the major platforms grows, people will begin moving to self-hosted solutions so that they're in control, no longer at the mercy of a for-profit organization whose only interest is monetizing their content. https://forum.jellyfin.org/

I think federated platforms will also have their place, fill some niche, but will never completely replace the major social platforms.

> the average user who is there just for the memes and doom scrolling the latest news.

Most platforms are only still alive because of the doomscrollers. They contribute a large chunk towards the DAUs (Daily active users). Ragebait and infinite scrolling just to get eyeballs on ADs is a terrible business model though. There has to be some other model that brings in revenue. Mastodon is coasting along nicely on donations and pocket money, but, still it has its issues.

Coomscrollers? Reddit aggregates a lot of NSFW material.

I'm still unhappy about them removing NSFW from r/all.

Back in the day I could keep scrolling until my feed was majority dongs, and that would be the end of Reddit for the day. No regrets about signing off. It was like a perfect equal and opposite force to balance my addiction.

Perhaps we need an alternative to “died”. Digg is still alive. The Yellow Pages is still a profitable business. And yet their cultural impact has been nullified.

Digg isn't really "still alive". That's like saying Michael Jordan is still alive because there's a guy named Michael Jordan. The current iteration of Digg (which is great, btw) has nothing in common with the original other than the domain name.

It would, however, be extremely funny if they took advantage of Reddit’s current travails, dug out the Digg v3 code (not sure if the same entity that owns Digg.com actually owns it) and rose from the ashes.

Or more realistically, just stood up a Lenny instance.

TBF we're not sure he's dead yet. They said the submarine has 96 hours of oxygen.

I haven't looked at Digg in a long time. Looking at it now, wow it's terrible, nothing but SEO/clickbait/sponsored trash. I'm comfortable with saying Digg is dead.

> it's not going to die, but it will be less popular and less relevant

That more or less _is_ death for a social media thing, though, because it tends to become self-reinforcing.

Since when is Twitter dying? I hear people say they have stopped using it since Elon bought it, but I feel like that’s the case of the loud minority changing the perception of Twitter. I still use it every day and it seems to have a vibrant user base.

I for one can't wait until the extremist zealot power users leave so normal people can have conversations on Reddit but so far it certainly hasn't happened.

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