The link contains db0’s views on the ongoing state of Reddit, and I think that it’s worth sharing here - both to document a piece of opinion, and as food for thought. The main points are:
- a comparison between the current state of Reddit vs. Myspace near collapse;
- the illusion that everything is fine based on “raw” numbers like engagement;
- that Reddit was never a “good” site, but it had two positive points (open API and hands-off approach to communities), destroyed by the current events;
- the ongoing progression of the Fediverse as alternative to Reddit;
- the change in quality in both the content and the behaviour of the people still there.
The text mentions an article from Cory Doctorow. I’ve copied it to a pastebin, in case someone can’t access it.
EDIT: I hope that the author doesn’t mind, but I’ll copy the contents of the article inside the spoilers below. Hopefully for mobile users it’ll be a bit more accessible.
Reddit is a dead site running
from July 10, 2023
Yesterday I read the excellent article by Cory Doctorow: Let the Platforms Burn and this particular anecdote
"The thing is, network effects are a double-edged sword. People join a service to be with the people they care about. But when the people they care about start to leave, everyone rushes for the exits. Here’s danah boyd, describing the last days of Myspace:
If a central node in a network disappeared and went somewhere else (like from MySpace to Facebook), that person could pull some portion of their connections with them to a new site. However, if the accounts on the site that drew emotional intensity stopped doing so, people stopped engaging as much. Watching Friendster come undone, I started to think that the fading of emotionally sticky nodes was even more problematic than the disappearance of segments of the graph.
With MySpace, I was trying to identify the point where I thought the site was going to unravel. When I started seeing the disappearance of emotionally sticky nodes, I reached out to members of the MySpace team to share my concerns and they told me that their numbers looked fine. Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed. I shook my head; I didn’t think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.
This is exactly what is happening to Reddit currently. The most passionate contributors, the most tech-literate users, and the integrators who make all the free tools in the ecosystem around reddit which makes that service much more valuable have left and will never look back.
From the dashboards of u/spez however, things might looks great. Better even! As the drama around their decision making certainly caused a lot more posts and interactions, and the loss of the 3rd party apps drove at least a few users to the official applications.
But this is an illusion. Like MySpace before them, the metric might look good, but the soul of the site has been lost. It’s not easy to explain but since I’ve started using Lemmy full-time, I’ve seen the improvement in engagement and quality in real time. half a month ago, posts could barely pass 2 digits, now they regularly break 3 and sometimes 4 digits. And the quality of the discussions is a pleasure to go through.
I said it before, but reddit was never a particularly good site. Their saving grace was the openness of their API and their hands-off approach to communities. The two things they just destroyed. It’s those 3rd party tools and communities that made reddit like it is. As as the ecosystem around reddit sputters and dies, the one around the Threadiverse is progressing in an astonishing rate.
Not only are the integrators coming from reddit aware what kind of bots and tools are going to be very useful, but a lot of those tools are shut off from reddit and switched to the lemmy API instead, explicitly cannibalizing the quality of the reddit experience. And due to the completely open API of the Threadiverse, those tools now get access to unparalleled access and power.
Sure if you visit reddit currently, you’ll see people talking and voting, but as someone who’s been there from the start, the quality has fallen off a hill and is reaching terminal velocity. But it feels like one’s still flying!
Not just the quality of the posts where only the most superficial meme stuff can rise to the top, not just the quality of the discussion, but even mere vibe of the discussions is just lost.
There’s now significant bitterness and hostility, especially as the mods who were responsible for maintaining the quality, have gone or are being hands off or just don’t have the tools needed to keep up. I’ve heard from multiple people who are leaving even while they were not originally planning to, because the people left over in reddit are just so toxic.
This is a very vicious cycle which will accelerate the demise of that site even further.
A house fire can go from a spark to a raging inferno in less than a minute. The flames consuming reddit are just now climbing up the curtains and it still appears manageable, but it’s already too late. Reddit has reached terminal enshittification and the only thing left for it to do, is die.
I was on reddit much longer than myspace and I still miss myspace more than reddit. lemmy definitely reminds me of the early days of many social network sites. reddit was just noisy programers faking users at the beginning…so perhaps we do that with our content again… I wonder if I spin up a lemmy instance If I can have midi playing on my page again?
Just as an FYI, MIDI does not make any sound; it’s just data containing pitch and velocity information (among other things). Virtual instruments use midi information to make the sounds. Windows (and I assume other OSs) have default virtual instruments that make the sounds that you would hear when playing a midi file, but that would sound different playing the same file through other virtual instruments. It’s a pretty common misconception.
On the other hand, don’t you dare try to bring back music autoplaying when you load a page from the myspace era!
You can’t have a good site without .mid files! Or without <blink>blinking text</blink>!
Wow, what a trip to the past!
Trying to figure out how my friend has a webpage at geocities.com/supercool and I have to have geocities.com/superawesome/superawesome.html
I’m not seeing any
fonttags, sonny. You can’t have a real web page without<FONT FACE="Verdana" SIZE="3" COLOR="red">Welcome!</FONT>Didn’t the inventor of the html blink markup apologize for creating it?
Or dancing baby icons. If it’s good enough for Homer J. Simpson, it’s good enough for you.
I finally understood midi by comparing it with emojis. The unicode standard only defines characters and their meanings, but it’s up to os or app developers to choose an actual visual representation to display.
Another anology would be sheet music.
Yes midi, I literally want a player piano to start up on anyones random page but especially my own! ⁂
Most browsers block audio autoplay now anyway, but you can always turn it off ;)
Similar to platform emojis being unique interpretations of the same information.
You can import basically any midi file in Guitar Pro and it’ll output a guitar tab
For sure; at that point it’s not even doing anything except formatting the data basically. If it’s a good program it might try to arrange things so that fingering is more efficient.
I feel like people had a stronger emotional attachment to Myspace than they have to modern social media. It was more like blogs (people were also fond of their own blogs, even bad ones). That’s perhaps even worse for Reddit because the “emotional cost of switch” is far smaller.
It’s probably doable, but odds are that you’d need to tweak Lemmy’s code for that.
no, it was that they were teenagers when they were using it. it’s pure nostalgia.
Yet I have zero nostalgia for Facebook.
I was almost 30 when I was on MySpace and I still loved it.
Perhaps this plays a role too, but I think that it’s more about its personal nature.
I might be an outlier, but I have zero nostalgia for my pretentious teenage emo-edgelord Myspace page - and I am glad it is lost to the graveyard of history