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Comment by phire | Hacker News Reader

It's really surprising how long reddit lasted.

Slashdot lasted maybe 10 years (though still limps on). Digg lasted about 4 years before it started shedding users at alarming rates (and 6 years before it killed itself).

But after 20 years, Reddit still is still gaining users; It's not dying yet.

Reddit has changed so much over time. Reddit of 2006 was very different to reddit of 2008, and reddit of 2013 was very different again. By 2019, it's more or less managed to reinvent itself as an App, trading blows with Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok, almost unrecognisable.

I'm sure many people will put peak-reddit around 2019, but for me, Reddit of roughly 2011 was my favourite, and it's only been down hill from there.

I don't think Reddit can re-invent itself again, only continue to get worse. But I suspect it will still be around in 10 years.

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It was quite interesting that Reddit had its own unique culture during the rage comics and narwhal era. At that time, you knew you were on Reddit and not some other site. Whereas now, it's pretty homogeneous with every other site.

I agree with you about Reddit being around in 10 years - because I don't see its users having any reason to suddenly depart, given every other large community is largely similar.

>ad its own unique culture during the rage comics and narwhal era. At that time, you knew you were on Reddit and not some other site. Whereas now, it's pretty homogeneous with every other site.

I disagree completely. You got the same thing at the same time on 4chan and other places as well.

I think it was less each place having a distinct & unique culture and more the overall culture of the internet was a huge fence between places of business/serious stuff and then the larger messy, funny, sad, sometimes offensive chaos of (mostly geeky or techy type people) side of the fence where Internet culture thrived - it wasn't a place of business, just a place to have fun and not everyone was there.

Because money, that wall has been broken down _from_ the business side of the Internet and business has leeched into almost every corner of our green space - all of that internet culture, funny cat videos, funny meme comics is all very profitable - especially if it's pushed and manicured for the masses using evil social media tactics.

That's the key, I think; the internet and all its culture has become INRT, as a stock that mostly only goes up, feeding on itself in the same way that Disney now only make live-action remakes.

Peak reddit was 2010-2015 in it's full uncensored glory

Wow 2019! Haha, yeah it went downhill way way earlier for me. The digg users joining changed the site for sure but when ever "famous" novelty accounts stopped being a big thing and the first rounds of subreddit banning it started to suck. I would have assumed for most peak reddit was around whenever there was the huge rally in DC. Perhaps there are lots more users now but the quality is awful, it used to be so easy to get multiple experts on anything to answer your questions.

> it used to be so easy to get multiple experts on anything to answer your questions.

It’s still possible to get useful answers on niche topics, but you will also get flooded with questionable sub-specific dogma, and god forbid your question is the tiniest bit obvious/unnecessary (according to the “experts” of course, never mind that it clearly wasn’t obvious to the asker)

I call that the stackoverflow effect, where once a topical community reaches a certain information density anything that does not go neatly on the very top of the current pile is mercilessly destroyed.

It's akin to the concept of "climbing a ladder to the top and then pulling the ladder up behind you", and imho it's the alarm bell that indicates that a community has died, even if the community itself does not know it yet.

I think it's just called the passing of time. Our bodies build up senescent cells. Our personalities do it as we move through being new adults in the world to old people shouting at clouds. You have something new and novel and empty and you add two pieces of knowledge/whatever and wow this is lively useful discussion. Over time you have 20,000 bits of knowledge/songs in the genre/etc and those two new bits aren't that exciting, get lost in the noise, get canceled by what came before.

In theory, yes, but there's also an insularization, where the older posters who got there first and accumulated clout inside of the group now actively prevent new users from participating until they have completely consumed the knowledge of the group, and even then they might still be excluded just for having an account that isn't old enough or that hasn't generated enough value to the group.

It would be like having to read and parse every book in the Library in order to get feedback on your short story, and half the time the reviewers will just throw your story in the trash before even reading the cover.

Stack Overflow itself is also being more overtly destroyed by the corporation that owns it. Did you know they de-attributed Luigi Mangione's posts in blatant violation of their license agreement to his content?

How do you know reddit is net gaining real users instead of bots and alts?

I'm basing my "still growing" assessment off google trends, nobody thinks to bot that. The trends for Slashdot and Digg [0] more or less match up with when they died. While reddit [1] is still growing (at least up until 3 months ago, but that's most likely noise). You really have to zoom into the right date range to not have Reddit dwarf Slashdot/Digg [2].

The new users aren't exactly high quality, but they seem to exist. Or at least advertisers think they exist.... shrug.

For some other fun trends, checkout Facebook which has been clearly declining since 2012, or Instagram which appears to have been declining since 2023... not entirely sure why.

[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=slashdot...

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=slashdot...

[2] Zoomed: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2004-01-01%202...

To be fair, adding "reddit" to your search query has been one of the few ways to get away from the SEO garbage to the point where it's become a thing. So I'm not sure how effective Google trends is as a measurement.

Guilty.

I know Reddit has become infested with junk recently, but it just shows how bad the broader-internet has become that I'd rather search in Reddit than walk in that swamp.

chatgptbots really saved that metric. the new scams putting the old scams on life support . maybe the next big thing can keep the llm-multimarketscheme alive. Forever growth by forever bigger scams.

The best Reddit was the one the users from Digg were migrating to.

HN is the closest facsimile to Reddit before the mass exodus from Digg

Digg is also supposedly coming back and has an early access sign up

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