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Comment by pmdr | Hacker News Reader

We were told that the boycotts last year were the end of reddit, or at least a substantial brain drain. Reddit was going to be a lawless wasteland because no mod would accept tending the garden anymore.

Reddit is now a public company with a CEO that just got a huge compensation package while mods still work for free. Far from lawless, far from being a wasteland.

Even the hacker community is still using reddit despite everything that's happened. This probably means that it hasn't lost any of its value.

Blocked VPN access or not, reddit already won.

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Front page vote counts are now typically 1/10th what they were before the exodus, and bot content is visibly more prevalent. If you expected the website to die overnight, that was just an unrealistic definition of failure for a large website. Digg, the failure that founded Reddit, is still alive today. MySpace still exists. AOL is still selling dial-up internet. Failure at this scale is a slow slide to irrelevance, and Reddit is well on its way. The only winner here is the CEO.

> Front page vote counts are now typically 1/10th what they were

Is that really a reliable metric for activity there? Genuinely curious. What if more content is being published and popular posts don't get as much voting because of the churn?

> before the exodus

Exodus to where, exactly? A few thousand users switching to some obscure alternative isn't much. Sure, people left Twitter, but Threads and Bluesky are way bigger than any reddit alternative.

I left for HN. Not going back.

I read HN more than I did before, but reddit has vastly more long-tail content than HN or anywhere else. Reddit is Usenet. There is nowhere else I can consume content about very specific interests all in 1 place like reddit.

I dived deep into RSS feeds and decided to really just try and follow content creators instead of relying on a single site.

It's been a process.

Daddy

> Is that really a reliable metric for activity there?

You see, that's like naturally an indication of activity.

> Exodus

A lot of people left searching for alternatives. Well, there was none and there is none - let's face it. However some stayed on Lemmys of the world and many (No, I don't have empirical statistics on these) returned but yet didn't really return. Many returnees have a quasi-zombie-like presence on reddit now (I am one example). I barely participate and if I do it's a quip or two couple of times a month. Basically, for some reason, I just don't give two shits about the "community" aspect of Reddit anymore. No, it's not anger. Something just went missing.

I was regular at and still visit two largest of the country and city subreddits (and few more) and the decrease of quality and engagement is palpable there. If nothing - the lull and uncertainty decreased the engagement and greatly degraded the experience of being there.

Many smaller and mid sized niche subs are just gone. Either made private permanently or are left abandoned with rules in place that makes engagement impossible. Reddit can take over and force the mods out but the engagement is not coming back. Remember these places were built from before Instagram and apparently mainstream Twitter generation. I doubt that is going to happen again. It was from another time and populated by a generation that didn't mind writing long texts and finding great content and sharing without an expectation of "influencer" status and income, among other things.

Having said that, I was shocked to see some of the Lemmy instances to be really active like small flourishing islands. Check some book/book review related for example if you are interested. A friend had sent me the link once - it was some "cafe", I can't recall; there might be more. I have no interest in those instances so I never joined.

tl;dr: people who cared - a lot of them - left. I think that matters.

Digg became a newsletter with cat pics, cute "you matter, don't give up" messages and other assorted clickbait. And it was forced upon the former userbase.

The only winner here is the CEO.

And the whiz kid who launches the new and improved competitor. Every failure story like this is also a seed of opportunity.

Only if the kid can sell it on to a bigger sucker in less than the ~20 years it took Reddit.

I do still insist that they've suffered a brain drain that has not recovered. A lot of niche communities are instead mainly on discord now (which is arguably worse due to no search engine visibility) and when I stumble onto reddit looking for info on something technical, I often see deleted/edited out comments instead of potentially useful responses.

That. So much deleted content…

For anyone reading this and wondering about other good platforms... Discourse [1] is awesome. Of course, someone has to pay for the hosting. Can't have someone else's cake and eat it too.

[1] https://discourse.org/

Anecdotally I am seeing communities I am part of gone from Reddit and other public social media in favor of private or semiprivate ones like Discord, or avoiding digital entirely in favor of physical spaces.

What I see on social media is more just the leftovers. There's little authentic interaction and engagement there.

Respectfully, this is a small sampling of what's happening.

Reddit and Twitter, the two posterchildren of poor management, have plenty of actual interaction. They also have a significant amount of shitty noise, which is incredibly off putting, but the average person is still more likely to go there than where our niche communities end up.

They might be dying slowly, but they're not even on life support yet.

I think reddit is actually thriving. Everyone I know spends time there nowadays.

I think Reddit used to be a niche site for hackers [1], hobbyists and enthusiasts. Now it's a mainstream site where regular people browse news and memes. Maybe Reddit alienated it former audience, but it doesn't mean it's dying - it just changed.

[1] as in "hacker news"

The internet used to be a place for hobbyists, hackers, and enthusiasts. That's not true anymore, at least not exclusively. But that supports your point - when the lake turns to saltwater you dont survive by being a freshwater fish.

Twitter is doing fantastic.

Just because people want to go back to more censorship doesn’t mean Twitter is dying.

> Twitter is doing fantastic.

Reported yesterday [0] that it’s worth 73% less than when elon took over.

You absolutely may have a different definition of fantastic but what was once one of the largest social sites losing 3/4 of its value in 15 months is significant.

aside from actual financial analysts, my own personal anecdata has pretty much mirrored their analysis. i’ve gone back and gave it an honest try like 4 or 5 times and each time has been worse than the previous. it just reinforced why i (and more and more people) choose to spend our time in other places.

[0] https://fortune.com/2024/03/30/fidelity-x-stake-73-decline-s...

Just gotta say that both things can be true.

Investment banks can find it worth less than it was from a return on stock financial view,

and millions of users can find it a fantastic messaging portal,

and individual people may not like aspects of the portal.

"was once one of the largest social sites" - I feel that X is still one of the largest social sites wordlwide and especially in the US.. Priori Data has them in the top 12 of the world at 600 million users 6 days ago.

(https://prioridata.com/data/social-media-usage/ )

Sure, it is public, but the price is going down, not up, as the IPO was just the exit strategy for all the investors who funded a site that never made a profit. And the overall vibe of the contents is bots and memes, not substantial content. There are exceptions to that, but that is exactly what they are - exceptions.

I'm not saying it'll be dead next week or anything... on the contrary, it probably will find a groove to survive in. But "substantial brain drain" sounds like a perfect description of what it really is.

Reddit reports something like 200 million active users. It could lose 99% of those, and it would still have more people than most cities.

What, you want tumbleweeds to physically roll across your screen when you look up "reddit.com"?

It's just a website. Use it, or don't. Save what you want, knowing it won't last. Sucks, but the Internet was meant for document delivery, not to become the one and only permanent home of certain social interactions.

> Reddit reports something like 200 million active users. It could lose 99% of those, and it would still have more people than most cities

Which would make it completely useless as an ad platform, which is the only way Reddit makes money.

The vast majority of people turned out to be highly passive and docile in the face of extreme enshittification. Sad, but that's where we're at.

Reddit only "won" the Eternal September types. The others have moved on.

Uh, reddit already won what exactly? How does going public have anything to do with success for a company like this? It's a way to raise capital and compensate insiders, nothing special

Communities come and go. They are 95% reliant on the members, and some of their recent moves are adversarial. Everything there is becoming corporate, even the porn.

More active users than ever before just in the last 2 quarters of 2023 after stagnating for years. Its almost like the API thing backfired and that bad press was in fact good press and got more people onto reddit.

The coup failed and whatever reddit's been doing is obviously good for business. I'd wager the majority of people boycotting reddit are still using it like nothing happened.

> more people

how are you so sure the extra traffic is from people?

VPNs, datacenters and Tor are pretty much blocked and API costs money, plus everyone I know uses it nowadays. I think it's mostly legit traffic.

> VPNs, datacenters and Tor are pretty much blocked and API costs money

There are services which provide a service so that your bot can still scrape from sites like reddit which try to block bots.

> Uh, reddit already won what exactly?

The right to do whatever they want and still keep the communities and content with pretty much no impact on their bottom line thereafter.

> How does going public have anything to do with success for a company like this? It's a way to raise capital and compensate insiders, nothing special

You raise capital if investors believe in the direction the company is heading. They're betting on reddit to make them money.

> Everything there is becoming corporate

Reddit didn't start out that way, at least it wasn't the impression that seasoned internet users got. It used to be developer-friendly and open, whether you were using Tor, a VPN or a datacenter's IP.

It's, of course, their right to steer the company as they see fit and towards profitability. My only wish is that people providing valuable content and moderation work would start to see that the company's values have changed.

For today. Even Facebook is in decline. Online platforms don't last forever.

I thought so myself until reading the latest earnings call.

Usually they do, either as some other company's acquisition or as a company that acquires others (like facebook/meta).

Little actually is entirely gone, someone snatches it when the price gets low enough.

Whether they grow themselves to the point they buy others or are bought is a distinction without a difference in this case. Their DNA exists in myriad ways, and even if they survived and weren't bought few few online companies are the same a decade later.

Reminds me when someone declared that phpBB won.

Well, that’s just it - we can have a lawless wasteland, or we can have arbitrary and capricious censorship. There’s no in between. If prefer the lawless wasteland (I remember them, they were much better than what we have now). Unfortunately, I’m in the minority.

The only thing stopping people is defeatism. People organized effective mass movements before the Internet - now it's infinitely easier, and so is the defeatist propaganda.

The Reddit CEO has been successful - one absolutely necessary reason is a lack of defeatism.

It's just so much better than anything else even despite it all.

Which, honestly, is perplexing. It doesn't seem like it would take much capital to replicate Reddit pre-enshittification, but nobody seems to even be trying.

I guess nobody can imagine making money off of a less shitty Reddit. Maybe the things about it that suck for users are the only things that make business people excited.

Lots of people tried (voat comes to mind), but they ran into the same advertiser pressure monetization problem that pushed reddit to become the abomination that it is today. For whatever reason, hosting is expensive, and too few people are interested in making it truly accessible.

Before Reddit (and digg, and Facebook groups), forums were pretty popular. I was on many of them and they were simply run by passionate members of a community, not someone looking to scale to a multi-billion dollar company. It was just some guy willing to burn a little time and a little cash to talk to like-minded people about stuff they found interesting. It’s expensive when consolidated into one mega-site like Reddit, but very manageable for a smaller site. The people I know/knew running them were average people with average jobs.

And such forums still exist, they're just not on the top of Google search results.

Populist protests usually fail, they only get their way when moneyed special interests are also lobbying for the same policy change out of coincidence, their interests usually pass regardless of public interest or not

People waste their energy and call it “using their platform”, or just reminding people how irrelevant and inconsequential they are but bragging about it

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