I've been seeing a lot of angst and emotion on the Reddit migration, which results in either defeatism or blind optimism. In the end, it probably doesn't matter, but I wanted to do more fact-based research into the subject.
I put my findings and my analysis into what it would actually take to kill Reddit, based on the deaths of Digg and MySpace. tl;dr it's a lot less dramatic than most people would think.
What always helped centralized social was an environment of rapid growth. For the majority of people there wasn't a "before" to compare to whatever they signed up to, so a play like the one Reddit made, which isn't about the quality of the content but "whatever gets people in the door", worked - focusing all your energy on hypergrowth was the Web 2.0 strategy. But my own "before" goes back to browsing Usenet over a dial-up shell account(terminal access only). The technology used then was primarily characterized by being efficient to store and process, which led to a federated model that shared text threads.
The reason people switched from Usenet to early web forums was also a combination of not having a "before", plus some new conveniences. Usenet moderation tools were very limited, ensuring that spam and derangement were common. Because the design was made just for text, you didn't have image-focused content, but you also didn't experience the things images get moderated for now - you could post a UU-encoded file that contained an image, or a link to an image, but you couldn't shove it in people's face. And tree quoting replies was normalized, if rather disorganized - long-running threads often got "forked".
The model of web forums that became most popular - flat topic threads, more images, centralized moderation - caused as many issues as it solved. Flat threading with no post ranking makes people reply "first" at the top of the thread, images create a whole attack surface, and centralized mods have more power to trip on. But they could provide a better experience along the narrow set of things they wanted the forum to be about, and that made all the difference. That's how the centralized model works. When I think of places like Something Awful or Newgrounds in their original heyday - it's really gatekeepy stuff. There were tastemakers and you followed their lead or else.
Reddit started with a lot of link aggregation, which was also Digg's thing - that model "pushes" more content than a regular forum, so it helps build broad-audience engagement. But Reddit added more Usenet-like elements, and those gradually took over a lot of the niches as more people started using Reddit to ask questions and make statements addressing a specific community.
Something that I think defines the federated space is that there is less "push". The power is more distributed, fewer gates to keep. Reddit represented those values for a while, and now it obviously doesn't, so the users who were there for that are going to drift this way very quickly.
As you mentioned, every common type of community forum has it's own "quirks" (I didn't want to say pros and cons or something like that) which make it suitable for a certain type of interaction.
Some are better for very large discussions joined by thousands of people, others are good for small groups talking about very specialized topics. Every style naturally promotes one type of interaction over the others.
Which is why I really like the federation system.
It allows people to create very different interfaces with different strengths and user experiences which still can share content between each other, even if the features of one interface isn't fully compatible with the content of another.
Overall, I feel like the experience on the fediverse, while familiar enough and easy to settle into, is very different than whatever systems everyone have been used to for decades. I think the reason for this is, as I said in the previous paragraph, that it gives developers a platform with already available content through other instances to test their interactive website ideas on, and provide the users with a whole lot of user experiences to choose from, while essentially keeping track of the same communities through it all.
As someone who came from a similar background and started on BBSs and Usenet, this is a very insightful post that I hope people internalize. The "enshittification" of what came before was a process that took a long time in many cases and with less of a factor of a specific group of people pushing a culture or taste this experience has a chance to grow into something completely different.
Good article. Just going to say it again here. Forget about killing Reddit. Just stop using it, and tell people about the alternatives. Enjoy this peaceful time in the fediverse while it lasts.
My mistake, I didn't even realise I was on a Kbin thread! It's fantastic that we're able to choose how we want to interact with the Fediverse like this
Yeah, that's a good point. Right now, Reddit, like Google, has to deal with a lot of issues due to the size of the userbase, like spammers putting a lot of effort into specifically targeting them. If the Fediverse gets big enough, that's gonna be a problem too, but at the moment, one nice thing is that there isn't a bunch of bots spamming it because it's more worthwhile to try to go after Reddit or whatever.
Another thing is - anyone who was there when Digg was still great knows — digg didn’t die overnight and there was no big movement. People started using Digg and Reddit simultaneously, and gradually moved away from Digg. There were platform changes etc, but Digg was already dying at that point. It happened organically.
It is a little surreal isn't it? Feels very much like the 'first time? ' meme seeing people posting on reddit in a panic about what they are going to do when it's over.
Yup. Agree with everything OP said. Been saying it since last week. The 48-hour blackout wasn't going to kill Reddit. Hell, if all 8,000 subreddits had gone with indefinite blackouts, it likely wouldn't have killed Reddit either. The fallout from Reddit's decisions, and their response to the community, is going to take months, and probably even years, to really be visible.
I've been on Reddit for more than 10 years. I started using Reddit regularly after Digg went to shit. I've seen the drama, controversies, and protests that previously have taken place on Reddit. But what's been going on the last couple of weeks, I haven't seen before. As I mentioned in another comment, this is the first time I've seen a concerted effort to find alternatives, not just for a few undesirables (i.e. Voat), but for the community as a whole.
Yeah, the communities here are not going to be nearly as active as they were on Reddit, but people want communities, and just having a friendly place to gather will be enough to slowly attract others.
People's idea of what a dead social media site looks like is very different from what they actually look like.
People think "immediate implosion and disappearing from the face of the internet", but social media sites die long before the last post is posted.
Forums with dozens of users used to die over months. Big social sites take years, and they die not by going dark or quiet, but by becoming generic and boring or filled with Nazis. Either way, they shift from being "sticky" to being easily skipped over.
Great article and demonstrates why we should not care about the demise of reddit. There is no clear date when the giant has been slain. It will simply attrit away over time if we all move on to the next thing, which is happening. Look forwards, not backwards, and enjoy the fediverse
Remember, Digg dying helped Reddit, but it didn't make Reddit. Reddit was already fairly well-established when Digg shat the bed. It was really easy for people to glom onto a pre-existing community that already had some people who posted on both Reddit and Digg. Lemmy and kbin aren't nearly as big or feature-complete now as Reddit was when all that Digg drama went down. However, we work with what we have, haha.
I've read that kbin had ~30 or so actual users before a few weeks ago. Look at them now. Lemmy is probably similar. New ideas take time to catch on and sometimes it takes a crisis to spur that into overdrive.
And now this is here, and development is being spurred on by the large migration, the next large Reddit crisis is likely to drive an even larger group here. Things will slowly build up and eventually you'll find that more things happen here than there.
Indeed, this makes sense. I'm looking forward to see where the fediverse will be a year from now (and whether I'll still be occasionally peaking at reddit).
Hopefully in 1-2 years the fediverse will be flush with members, instances, and content. Just give it time
I wasn't here for the digg->reddit migration (I stumbled upon reddit without knowing what digg was). But this is a very insightful take. The idea of becoming "the" place for niche communities is an interesting idea, because for a lot of these alt-platforms it honestly feels like the opposite (only the most shallow generic popular topics end up being active).
Maybe this means something like dbzer0 has a bright future? The article mentions reddit being "the" place for tech and facebook being "the" place for college students. I wonder what kbin's equivalent is or could be?
If you have the community people will come, and they will get over the fact that you don't have a mobile app. If you don't have the community, no amount of cool features will get people to come over and stay.
Very nice. I wasn't a Digg user when Digg dugg its grave, so it's nice to get some stats from back then to give a better idea of what to expect now. Honestly, I was predicting a slow decline for Reddit even before this, I just thought it was a "different" way of collapsing than what Digg did. Turns out it's more similar than I thought.
I'm not convinced that this is going to be a Digg-style collapse, but I do think that there are legit points about Reddit attritting over time.
That being said, Reddit benefitted hugely from the Digg influx, and it left an impression on the community. Team Reddit clearly was concerned about doing a Digg over the years, and I'm pretty sure that that's why old.reddit.com stayed around.
The parallels are kind of striking, though. I was on Reddit long before the Digg influx, and I remember all those new users feeling their way around, trying to figure stuff out. Using Digg terminology, mostly being angry with Kevin for the changes he was forcing on them. Reddit having load problems from the influx. I was explaining how Reddit worked to those Digg newcomers, the way the existing Fediverse people are now to me. It's like that all over again, just now I'm looking at things from the side of the new arrivals.
As this article describes, even Digg's collapse wasn't actually the Digg-style collapse that we commonly imagine it was nowadays.
It's interesting how human memory and historical records can distort things. I've been following the Ukraine war closely, for example, and there's a lot of people who are thinking that Ukraine has failed because their current counteroffensive hasn't achieved a rout in 2 weeks. Wars like these take years to unfold, and then we read about them in minutes on Wikipedia so people don't get an intuitive sense of that.
Very grounded in reality and well written thank you. It'll be a small community for some time, eventually after a year or two I think it will become the new front page for the majority of the current Reddit users.
I feel like most of the general public has no clue what the fediverse is, it truly does take time to grasp.
Good perspective on what's been going on. I especially liked the idea that copying reddit won't be enough -- a fresh community needs to grow. Thanks for the article
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