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Comment by ChrisArchitect | Hacker News Reader

It's not fundamental, it's a glorified forum host, not to say that isn't immensely useful in the current landscape. But it's also very much a result of timing that it is still here.

The history is often overlooked: when digg imploded/shot itself in the foot, Reddit was in the right place at the right time and got lucky. Somewhere for the exodus to go to. Reddit itself was failing fast and on its last legs at the time held afloat by its core users and that's it. They didn't know what they were going to do and rather than being visionaries in any way really they got lucky hosting everyone with a slew of very standard web 2.0 features. And as with any social site, it's the userbase/community that pulls it thru darkness to the where it is now.

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This is true, and I was a "Digg refugee" who went to Reddit after the Digg 4.0 fiasco. But nearly all successful businesses have a huge amount of lucky timing. Reddit also had the nimbleness to capitalize on Digg's failure. I remember reading a blog post years back about how they were able to do things really quickly (I think the post was about how they changed their alien logo in like a day to something welcoming Digg folks) because they were a small startup back then.

Absolutely true. Reddit's true success started when Digg failed (remember MrBabyMan??)

Digg -> Reddit -> ?

MySpace -> Facebook -> ?

Yahoo -> Google -> LLM?

Digg -> Reddit -> Discord

MySpace -> Facebook -> Instagram/Tiktok

Yahoo -> Google -> LLM

I don't like these developments, but they seem like likely candidates.

I'm curious why you think, Discord is the replacement for Reddit?

Feel like they server different purposes.

They might have once but every sub Reddit has at least one, “join my discord server” post a day it seems. People just want browser based BBS but weren’t alive when they were at their best.

I think that while Reddit's primary use is link aggregation, there's a secondary use for getting really niche questions answered by members of niche communities.For example, I have questions and answers on subs like r/powershell & r/xcode that still get replies years later because they solve a very specific problem.

A lot of communities are choosing Discord for their homebase location rather than Reddit, which really bums me out because I'm not a huge fan of public Discord servers and I miss seeing the posts from all the niche communities I'm in aggregated somewhere.

They function differently, but in terms of what gets communities to actually form and stick around, I think they're very similar:

- Making a new space for your community is trivial for anyone; it can be done in seconds with a few clicks and all you have to do is choose a name.

- Many people already have an account, so you don't need to convince everyone to sign up for a new platform. (Which scales with the platform's size, like all network effects.)

- Communities have their own space they can adjust to their liking, rather than being a vague cluster of nodes with a similar interest like in other social networks.

- Owners of those spaces have a lot of leeway to run things as they see fit.

Personally, I don't like the growing trend of every community being a Discord server that is going to collect dust in the corner of my chat window unless I commit to keeping up with it every day, but I understand why it's happening. Discord is an adequate social hub for any project or hobby group with a very low barrier to entry, which is more important than the actual functionality being the best IMO.

Far easier to manage a focused community, disseminate information rapidly, maintain a history of information.

For example im currently playing though a mod pack for a game more that 20 years old; post about it on reddit and you get nothing; post on the discord and 30-40 active people will quickly get you the info you need.

Search reddit for info (using google because reddit search has never and will never work) You'll end up with post after post of [Deleted]. Its beyond useless.

Maybe federated networks will catch on

> Yahoo -> Google -> LLM?

Yahoo -> Google -> OpenAI -> Microsoft.

LLM is a tech stack, not a company.

I added MS at the end because OpenAI brought it to forefront of the current wave of computing revolution.

Slashdot->HN

Slashdot → Kuro5hin

digg followed StumbleUpon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StumbleUpon). StumbleUpon was the source of the vast majority of digg and reddit content before people like Randall Monroe were making high quality comments on reddit. Once every reddit post had a literal expert respond with high quality comments, it dominated the others and content began to be posted on reddit first, rather than the content being found on stumbleupon or digg and ending up on reddit. Eventually things like askreddit became popular and community style content flourished.

Friendster > Myspace

Besides general luck and timing, there are two other factors reddit had going for it.

1) It was never the hot social media site, and still to this day it's a dark horse with even some of my peers not "getting it." We're finally seeing it get the user base and mass market usage of other social media platforms. But it's been an extraordinarily long process. So it was never a hot place to work that attracted product managers / MBAs / status seekers that would come in and META the site. And I think even the investors and/or owners didn't know what to do with it, and were kinda content to just ignore it and let it do it's thing.

2) General incompetence. Search broken for decades. Videos broken for decades. Limited features for decades. Inability to make a native app that's usable. Not to say that I mind the UI of old.reddit.com. But that the Reddit team moved so slow to do anything. The only time the acted with expedience was when controversies occurred. Yeah, they're finally rolling out new stuff, but it's only been in the past 2-3 years that dev on the platform has picked up.

But the thing is, this is the REASON Reddit has become as important as it is. A "competent" startup would of enshitified reddit and it would of died 15 years ago. Just like Digg. Instead we got almost a decade where the site looked like the frontpage of hackernews. And in that time, users kept creating high quality text content. And that content brought other users. And it slowly snowballed to the point where reddit is now the place to get genuine human text content on any topic. This is not something that could of occurred in the sort of time frame most startups or VCs operate in. And now they're trying to play a game that doesn't exist anymore (social media in the 2010s), and destroying the site with bad UI, hostility to the primary content creators, changes to the algorithm to prioritize engagement vs. nurturing quality content. It's sad, but I'm happy Reddit existed for as long as it did.

> But that the Reddit team moved so slow to do anything

This is actually the killer feature that has made Reddit so successful - not much has changed and the content keeps coming in. Same reason HN has still continued to do well.

>A "competent" startup would of enshitified reddit and it would of died 15 years ago.

Germans have a saying for what Reddit has achieved here: "Falling up the stairs".

Yeah, it's ironic that they're finally developing new stuff... and it's all absolute user-hostile garbage. My prediction is the IPO bombs hard and they're eventually sold off for scrap as training data for LLMs.

The new UI was awful. Recently, they made some changes that IMHO improved it quite substantially.

With a bit of work, it could be a good refresh of the original.

> And it slowly snowballed to the point where reddit is now the place to get genuine human text content on any topic.

That's what was interesting about the CEO's statement about their IPO, talking about how the future of Reddit is AI. Umm... I think what makes reddit great is you can actual get genuine humans discussing things they are passionate about. AI generated text seems like the opposite of this.

I wouldn't read too much into that, every tech company wanting to IPO in 2024 has to satisfy clueless investors with talk about their AI strategy. If this was 15 years ago they would be talking about investing to 'harness the efficiencies of the cloud' or something...

I don't know, if you take a look at the Reddit discussion here you'll find a lot of people who look down on Reddit users. The very same people probably Google "search term reddit" to get anything useful, but think of redditors as peasants. They don't appreciate them. The founders seem like they are part of this self-perceived "landed gentry" and may very well do something stupid with AI.

Although, in fairness, every business venture depends on timing to some degree. Good luck successfully getting a Google up and insanely profitable in 1900 or 2000. There are specific windows founders need to hit to find a market.

Curiously, eyeballing the search engine wiki page [0] for when the engines I know about started it looks like there was a window in the mid 90s (Yandex, Google, MSN Search -> Bing) and another one might have opened in 2010s (DDG, Bing #2, Yandex English).

People found these companies continuously, but there is a temporal component to when these companies take off.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine

Exactly, the pure meritocracy bs is exactly that, bs. I realize that this isn't apparent to younger people necessarily. Reddit is cool but not exactly earth shattering technology. Luck was a huge factor in its success. I've been on reddit since 2005 FWIW.

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