The difference was Reddit had already built up a reasonably comparable audience when Digg imploded so the migration was easy. If you look at a similar graph of Reddit today and Lemmy/Kbin, you probably wouldn't even see these tools register with the active user base of Reddit so high. I think "rhyme" of history is that another service will eventually win, and it might be ours, but it's more akin to the fall of the British Empire than an overnight event.
I assume that he's comparing the migration of Digg users to Reddit when Digg rolled out its very unpopular v4 interface to Reddit making the current changes to their policies today.
In the past, Reddit has cited not wanting to be in Digg's shoes as a reason for keeping around the old.reddit.com interface for users who did not like the new one, so not wanting to do a Digg v4 is a consideration that I believe has been on the minds of the company in past years.
The bad publicity hurts it a lot though. It's not something tangible that people are going to see results in for a long, long time. It's going to be more gradual than immediate.
Also Reddit will retain a huge majority of people, but the quality of it's communities will decline over time. People will find less of a reason to go there, and companies paying for data scraping will pay less as it will become much less efficient to use it.
Think more like Facebook. Still a huge mega company that has a iron grip in the social media sphere... but largely only gets used by tech illiterate older people. It's often quoted as the "place memes go to die" and "a place for grandma" or boomers in general. Reddit, and Twitter will essentially become similarly comparable.
Anyone saying otherwise, is goofy. Either trying to see an immediate result... or those trying to argue there will be no results.
I really hope that Reddit is getting punished for being too greedy. But I’m afraid that it is too big too fail just like Twitter sadly. But I’m glad that I’ve found Lemmy.
They were unprofitable BEFORE the debacle. Whether this sinks Reddit or not, they are absolutely not too big to fail. They haven't yet figured out how to succeed even.
Social media empires are like silent movie era film stars. They don’t abruptly stop existing. They just fade into obscurity whenever something newer and “sexier” comes along.
Digg failed fast due to people already using reddit. Many users had an account on each by the point of the big update. Enough were giving up on Digg for earlier changes.
Digg kept trying to find better ways to monetize, but eventually just gave up on keeping its own identity. By the time Digg released the big UI change, many users just stopped using Digg and used their reddit accounts. Many did have to create new accounts, but reddit was functionally better Digg by that point.
So what made Digg fail fast was due to it already being on the ledge. Digg chose to jump as opposed to get pushed off. Reddit didn't have a strong alternative coming up like Digg had.
I guess I'm mostly rambling, but Digg was set up to fall already. It just decided to go for it. And reddit was so good for so long that alternatives never built up a users.
In a way I'm glad this time around we're building our OWN instead of jumping into another centralized platform. If it happens again, we can just shard off and host out own instance and still follow all our favorite communities etc .... @Paesan
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