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Comment by badgers | Hacker News Reader

I remember Digg being more popular than Reddit more than a decade ago. What happened that caused Reddit to succeed where Digg failed?

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Digg was more self-immolation than failure. Reddit succeeded by being the place people fled to from Digg.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#Digg_v4

Reddit is on the same path, but it's more of a slow burn.

> Many users, upon finally reaching the site, complained about the new design

Sounds like Reddit. When I go to reddit, I use "old.reddit.com". I hate the new version, once old.reddit disappears, I disappear too.

The lack of an obvious place to go seems to be all that stands between Reddit and total collapse. Instead of an obvious Digg->Reddit type path, it's more like Reddit->a bunch of less than equivalent options.

You've got your Lemmys and Lobsters and so on, but none of them are a centralized catch-all. I can't (for example) go to Lobsters and talk about Star Trek in a /r/DaystromInstitute equivalent, and the official equivalent running on Lemmy is far from equivalent to what the subreddit was before all this chaos.

It's kind of the same deal with Twitter. Twitter was the place ~everyone went to as forums collapsed. Now there's [Discord, new forums, Reddit, 9000 different ActivityPub platforms, Bluesky, Cohost, ...] and none are quite a match for what even the narrowest niche used Twitter for. You could easily go from your forum chat threads and topical threads and recreate that experience on Twitter with a high level of fidelity. Digg->Reddit was similar.

There's no obvious match for the centralized platforms because they sucked up all the energy for creating new centralized platforms that existed before.

The obvious place is discord, but discord sucks in lots of other ways. Great for voice chat, but not great as a reddit replacement.

I can't understand the appeal behind Discord for general communities. Everything is one giant persistent group chat--there's no discrete threads or posts to search, at least not in the servers I'm in. Sad that so many companies are opting for Discord for building communities.

I've tried multiple times to use discord, and the fundamental blocker for me seems to be in it's name. Every one feels just like a private slack channel for a company I don't work for. Discordant.

To say that product is going to replace twitter is -imo- just wrong.

Same, Discord is useless to me

I think less centralization is actually a good thing but yes it does mean that reddit can hang on a little longer because it's less obvious to people what they can replace it with.

If old.reddit didn't still have a very sizeable user base they definitely would have killed it by now, so you are not alone.

It's only about 5% of users, which is sizable but not unkillable by any means. The third-party mobile apps had way, way more than that and they proved very killable.

I wonder how much those 5% contribute compared to the folks using the new interface.

When Digg started to do stupid things, everyone switched to Reddit.

When Reddit started to do stupid things, some people moved to lemmy but it wasn't as clear cut... I guess distributed networks are always a bit harder to get traction.

So the question is, if Digg users fled to Reddit, where are Reddit users fleeing to now?

Before anyone replies with "the fediverse"… I've heard people talking about Mastodon etc. for years now and afaict it's still a fringe nerd thing that most people outside techie HN-adjacent circles haven't heard of. It doesn't seem remotely comparable to Reddit in terms of popularity, or potential popularity.

I think the issues is that there isn't an obvious successor place - rather lots of different ones - lemmy, etc...

Mastodon recently blew past 15m users, though, so not nothing.

Is that registered or MAU?

Internet forums are fundamentally not companies that can grow infinitely and where investors 10-100x their money. Digg was unprofitable. Tumblr was unprofitable. Twitter is unprofitable. Reddit is unprofitable. When VCs/investors ramp up the pressure the company has to change in ways the community doesn't like, and that is what normally kills it. Whether that happens with Reddit as well is TBD, but I can personally say that the quality of the forum has been steady declining over the last few years.

How does Facebook succeed making stupid amounts of money in this context? Is it the reality that they just have enough of data to make targeting effective enough?

They serve up a ton of ads, which is also gradually driving people from Facebook. But if reddit served as many ads, it would be completely unusable.

Ads make the signal to noise ratio degrade. That works for spending a few minutes on FB, skimming to see what's up with friends or family, but not for reading long forum threads on reddit.

Facebook doesn't just serve ads. They have high quality identity and market data on their users that is very appealing to advertisers looking to spend their money on specific targets. I don't think reddit is currently able to supply advertisers with data of that quality. I assume forcing people to sign up with an email or use the app instead of the website are attempts at bridging that gap.

Network effects mostly. If your relatives or friends are on facebook then you will either have to put up with it or miss out on social contacts. This does apply to other kinds of forums too to some extend but limited to a more abstract numbers game where the biggest forum is the place to be rather than more personal direct connections that you don't want to cut.

You cannot use Facebook without creating an account and giving them a shit ton of data about yourself and your entire network. That data is what is used to show ads on all their properties and all over the internet. Reddit's user base on the other hand is mostly anonymous.

Facebook has best-in-class behavioral advertising tools, and can be used to create highly specific segments for ad targeting. You can sell pretty much anything on Facebook, so that attracts advertisers.

Reddit on the other hand has a bunch of anonymous users whose preferences are much harder to figure out.

Reddit users pour their personalities and interests into their comments. They are highly targetable.

Like I said, Facebook has better tools. Reddit is rock bottom when it comes to their ad product. They should have swallowed Twitter's business when their advertisers started fleeing, but they haven't.

> Twitter is unprofitable. Reddit is unprofitable.

At least for Twitter and Reddit, these could be profitable. There's so much fucking garbage done on both platforms... remember the hexagon NFT profile pictures on Twitter or Reddit's NFT avatars? Who in their right mind other than cryptobros would/did buy these, and how much developer attention got sucked in by these projects? Reddit has around 2.000 employees, what are they doing all day long, given that most moderation is being done literally for free?

I believe the difference is that when Digg screwed up the redesign Reddit was ready to take its refugees. When the Reddit fiasco happened last year there was no clear place to migrate to.

Having said that, and being perhaps too negative, do we know how alive Reddit actually is? Because once you factor the power users that left, the bots reposting top comments on reposted stories, the auto-generated content and the shills it is possible that Reddit has already started its decline but hasn't noticed yet.

Back to Digg? :)

There was also this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg#AACS_encryption_key_contr...

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