That’s a recent quote from Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler. Here’s more of it: This week, Reddit has been telling protesting moderators that if they keep their communities private, the company will take action against them. Any actions could happen as soon as this afternoon.
Reddit is too big to fail, they have achieved critical mass. Keep in mind facebook is still around despite being a reviled company, and instagram certainly hasn’t had a mass migration off of the platform either.
At the end of the day Lemmy isn’t a replacement to reddit yet. It depends entirely upon it getting traction which thus far still hasn’t occurred - we are not at critical mass yet. I hope it happens but there are many reasons why this site could fail even after reddit’s admin blunders. Too many people are apathetic to the changes and not all of them are lurkers who do not post or comment.
Today you can’t just stop using reddit either, especially for google searches. Too much content is ONLY on reddit. It’s a huge problem. We really need a wikipedia style reddit where it’s not for profit and still moderated for content.
lol nah Reddit can fail. Just like Tumblr, and Digg, and MySpace, and LiveJournal, and GeoCities, and the list goes on. Reddit relies on volunteer work to provide its content, and just like when Digg tried to do almost the same thing, the community will move on. It always does. It has since the 80s and will until the extinction of humanity or the collapse of civilization.
Let it fail.
Exactly. Where’s all that information that used to be on Newsgroups when you had to use dial-up? It’s kinda not at your fingertips anymore. If there was anything relevant in the 21st century, it’s been repeated somewhere and you can find it. This is something that people seem to have forgotten: useful human knowledge is not reliant on the Internet. It’s in our brains and we pass it on from generation to generation. Reddit or any other social media platform is not the owner of human knowledge. It’s just a tool for its distribution that we use. People still control the useful knowledge and the internet is still controlled by people. Maybe we’re fast approaching some sci-fi horror movie where that won’t be true anymore, but that moment hasn’t happened yet.
I love this take
Facebook rebranded to Meta and burned $13 billion on the “metaverse” to stay relevant. So, Facebook doesn’t seem to think that Facebook will be around forever. Reddit does have critical mass, which is an advantage for them. There’s no denying that. But, it’s their advantage to waste by being overly aggressive and greedy, which they seem to be happy to do.
As for Google searches, it might be less that Reddit is so valuable for search and more that Google has become so bad at providing good search results that Reddit became the go between. There’s a lot of very specific knowledge on Reddit, but there’s also a lot of redirects from Reddit comments to outside sources that have the info that a Google search should be able to provide. I don’t know if Google has the will to fix that problem though. If Reddit can “get back to normal” and continue being Google’s sidekick, Google might be happy to return to the status quo. But, once a company like Reddit adopts the policy that “the beatings will continue until morale improves,” it’s hard to imagine how they can get back to “normal.”
At some point it’ll be easier for Google to buy reddit for the content than to unfuck their own search engine. Bonus points because they can tell themselves they fixed it for good and keep making google search even shittier.
I have wondered if some of the big players interested in AI might decide to buy or recreate (again) something like Reddit so that they just have the data and control it. Google owns Youtube, so they are already managing the liability that comes with moderating a social media platform.
I’m okay with lemmy getting just enough traction to bring in the best users without being “popular”
This is the most level-headed take. Reddit is going to continue to slog along with or without my account, with or without Lemmy’s 53k active users. Anyone who thinks this protest is going to sink them entirely is naive.
However, they may stagger along as an enshittified website that has lost it’s spirit and never meaningfully grows again. Reddit is still better than any other alternative at this point in time, but Reddit is not by my estimation going to improve again. It’s all downhill. So I’m doing my part and trying to work to build community elsewhere.
We don’t need 50MM users to reach a mass where the content is fresh and engaging all the time. Probably a fraction of that would be. Lemmy’s userbase is double Squabbles and there is already a noticeable difference in content.
Yep. I think people need to think about what “failure” means in this context. Reddit isn’t going to go away, and honestly the “default” experience - what you see when you just visit the homepage - isn’t likely to change much at all IMO.
The thing is I haven’t liked the default reddit experience for many years. The draw of reddit was that they could do all their crappy changes to the default-level site and it still left the niche discussion-based communities to their own devices.
Now they’ve affected those communities, which is why I’m here. But I’m well aware that a great majority of reddit’s userbase uses reddit to doomscroll through endless insipid bot-generated meme lists. None of that is going to change. People like me who care about the small places that will be impacted are in a very small minority compared to the overall userbase of reddit.
So reddit will fail (or has failed) for my use case, certainly. But I’m under no illusion that it will cease to exist.
I feel like I’m being repetitive, but yes your point that the Reddit popular/all front pages won’t be dramatically affected is spot on. Those are where a huge amount of passive users spend their time, and the posts there have been trash and reposts for years now.
The quality content enjoyed by many people who jumped ship was never showing up on the front page anyway. I made numerous original content posts that gained a lot of traction relative to the niche subreddit it was in, but my 3K upvoted quality content was never going to compete for popular/all space with a 50k upvoted repost of a repost of TikTok video.
I did notice, when I visited Reddit desktop today that r/popular has a lot of political posts, despite one of popular’s reasons for existing to be a non-political alternative to r/all. I wonder if that’s something that’s crept in over time and I never noticed, or if that’s the result of losing so many subreddits that politics had to backfill popular though.
I think being repetitive is ok, because I continue to see the sentiment out there that everyone who is upset about reddit is delusional and think reddit will be closed in a month, etc.
The reality is more complicated. And I think a lot of people don’t get it because a real lot of people actually don’t ever see the great parts of reddit that we all loved.
I like to get that message out there as much as possible because saying reddit is ruined for my usage isn’t the same as saying it is going to go under.
/r/popular has been full of political stuff since long before trump became president.
R/popular was created not long before Trump was president. Either 2015 or 2016. My understanding is it was partially a response to the_donald flooding r/all.
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Digg had critical mass. It went down in flames.
It doesn’t take bajillions of users to generate enough content to form a reasonable alternative.
Niche subreddits will be hard to recreate though unfortunately, but plenty of time to grow. And long-term, federated seems like a good model so that once these communities are rebuilt they aren’t at the mercy a company who’s main concern is short-term profits.
Digg had critical mass relative to other sites of that era, but that was a very different Internet. Digg was never even close to as huge or ubiquitous as reddit is now. I really think the two situations, while similar, really are not comparable.
Federation makes so much sense for reddit style communities. I hope it’s able to catch on
Federation makes so much sense for reddit style communities. I hope it’s able to catch on
Maybe showing others in real life might help them make the switch?
Too big to fail doesn’t mean it’s too big to decline.
I don’t think reddit is going anywhere as a company and a platform, for a while at least. But that doesn’t mean it can’t lose a good share of it’s users to competitors.
I don’t think the comparison with Facebook is a valid one though. Primarily because Facebook is a “true” social media platform. You have your friends and family on it which creates a very strong network effect.
Reddit on the other hand is primarily a content aggregation platform. I don’t need to convince my friends and family to switch from it.
Additionally, Facebook is a lot more successful than Reddit financially. They make disproportionately more money per user due to having very targeted advertising. They own other platforms like Instagram and whatsapp. Unlike reddit, Facebook doesn’t need to concern itself with having financial troubles.
A better comparison would be tumbler, which was quite big and while it still exists, it’s a shell of its former self.
Digg still exists even if it’s a shell of its former self. Tumbler imploded and moved to Twitter, which is trying its damnedest to destroy itself too. They don’t disappear, they just slowly become irrelevant.
Reddit will still exist, but the content will continue to dry out. Sanitized for advertising and low effort for consumption. The thousands of small self contained communities that really drove the site will slowly die off. Subs that relied on outside moderating tools to ensure quality content will give up and move on.
As small hobby subs find new places to take residence I would absolutely believe reddit will become less relevant.
MySpace is still up, you can theoretically go open up a new profile on there right now and connect with whoever the heck else is still on there, but it’s no longer a zillion-dollar megasite.
Facebook may not have failed, but it’s a shell of the platform that it was. Twitter is on the way to that status, Tumblr did it to their users and it’s happened time after time. The little bit I’ve browsed the front page of reddit in the last little bit there’s been a noticeable drop in post and comment quality.
I know there’s a few reddit archive projects, and it may be worth looking into a project that could scrape the html and present the info without it being Reddit.
You think facebook is dying? their monthly active users have grown year over year every year so far. It slowed down approaching 3 billion but still grows. https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/
Twitter’s user count by comparison is a joke, 368m in 2022, but as of current statistics they have only ever grown despite doom and gloom over the changes. I always hated twitter, but the facts are what they are. They do predict a decline of the platform but it’s far from an abandonment. Since twitter is now private it’s unlikely we’ll get great data from them moving forward. https://www.statista.com/statistics/303681/twitter-users-worldwide/
Reddit doesn’t have equivalency statistics since it’s always been private. Best I can find places it somewhere between 800m and 1.6 billion monthly active users. Way bigger than twitter and honestly given that lemmy has yet to break 0.01 billion MAU i’m not convinced lemmy will succeed or not. I’m obviously here because I want it to, i’m just not drinking anybody’s koolaid because I wish things to be a certain way regardless of reality.
I don’t think reddit will go anywhere, i’m just not using it anymore.
Lurkers don’t create content, it’s content that keeps eyeballs, which can then be monitised with ads.
Basically all social media apps, inc reddit, run on the 90-9-1 model; 90% lurk, 9% interact (vote), 1% create (posts, comments).
You can get away with a lot by pissing off 5% of the 90%. You can’t if that 5% is the other two groups.
This is correct. Facebook is a fundamentally different site than what most people think. They’re taking the Google approach, investing heavily into providing infrastructure for under developed countries. They have subsidiaries like Discover which partners with local internet providers to offer free or discounted internet access. WhatsApp provides an alternative messenger system for regions like SEA or interior India and Pakistan, etc.
Facebook doesn’t give a shit that you and your friends don’t use it anymore. They’re making money off techno-colonizing foreign nations.
Yes, reddit will always retain some user base and they might even continue to grow. But the quality will be worse. Just like Facebook and other social media platforms, there will be users that simply don’t care enough to look for alternatives. I really hope that it will be a downward spiral for them. Too many (contributing) core users leaving, moderation getting worse and spammers and karma farmers reducing the quality of posts to a point where it’s just too cumbersome to scroll through all the crap to find a worthy post. I think that reddit either reverses its decision or that it will slowly fade into meaninglessness…
The quality has been dropping for years and years. I miss reddit from a decade ago, when niche little community things could happen leaving waves across the site.
Now we just get a ton of the same things over and over, hardcore advertising and mass manipulation. It’s no longer the tiny little site nobody knew about but is instead the big focus for all the businesses out there that think there’s a market to be had. Plus there’s the herd mentality that always comes from giant populations on a platform.
Don’t get me wrong, there are still niche communities but they just don’t have the same flavor of cohesion that they did in earlier times.
One thing I did on Apollo was take advantage of the powerful filtering it provided.
I keyword filtered every politician, and hot political topic. Then for years I filtered subreddits from r/all. I filtered political subs, ragebait, “look at stupid people”, Twitter hottakes, memes, and porn (yes porn eventually pops up in all if you filter the other stuff enough).
What I had created with my years of filtering was an r/all that was actually great to see. Tons of niche original content subreddits that I’d never have thought to look for popped up. It was great seeing people posting in their communities for the enjoyment of it, not caring they were getting 5000000000 upvotes. When comments complained about r/all being trash it often took me a minute to realize that my r/all was very different than what most people saw.
I’m really going to miss that specially filtered r/all.
This is also my take. Reddit today is very different from DIGG 10 years ago, in that for a majority of users, their experience of USING the site will not change. These users access the site normally, or even with an ad blocker, but that’s about it. For them, nothing has changed.
What’s left is a vocal, but powerful minority. Reddit Enhancement Suite for desktop users won’t notice a change at all, until Reddit decides to do otherwise. Same with old.reddit. 3rd Party app users are the only ones FORCED to use something different: Official app, Desktop, or leave/move to Lemmy/Kbin. Reddit will still keep going, but the overall quality and usefulness will decline. Spez is betting that this will be enough to survive, and he’s probably right. Their valuation can tank all they want but it’s still in the Billions from what I last saw.