The landed gentry are only in charge until the king comes to town and chops off a few heads. At least that seems to be the case at Reddit, where CEO Steve Huffman pretended his complaints about current moderators — who were protesting his decision to effectively cut off API access to tons of useful…
I don’t understand why the CEO thinks this is some 4D business move. This is not the first time most of us have transitioned like this regarding social outlets. There must be records and archives proving that it is unwise to treat a community as negatively as it has … because it’s too easy for internet folk to just up and move to a new place of interest. Time is wrought with soo many examples:
For those of you who are ancient, there were the bad days of AOL and Yahoo, and then time moved on with ideas like social networks and board systems like 4chan. But how did they not know? Just look at what is in store for future Reddit by heading to the front page of Digg.
For one, I mean, look at this sad, sad, sad thing! Further, have you wandered to see Myspace… not sure who that audience is, but hey, to each their own. Hell, I can assure you that most of us only keep FB to keep some contact with family and old friends. I suppose the root of what I am saying is
I doubt spez cares about reddit. He cares about money. If he has to throw the site under a bus to make some more money he will gladly do it
If investors have any memory at all though, they aren’t going to give him tons of money, because he triggered the Reddit collapse before he sold out.
The Online Ad Game is not a long one. It’s about getting people to show up to your site when the ad is shown. No one is paying Reddit to grow brand recognition.
IPOs are all pump and dumps. No exceptions.
I worked at reddit during the Digg transition. We all were amazed at how utterly tone-deaf Digg was, how they had already taken some of their problematic features (higher karma users votes being stronger, votes being public, etc) to the extreme (letting companies literally purchase front-page space that wasn’t marked as an ad, etc).
Fast forward 12 years and reddit is somehow upping the ante and being even worse. At least Digg 4 ran well on the browsers of the time. new.reddit can kick up the CPU on an M2 Max fully loaded with RAM
Some of us were there when Digg died, ended up on Reddit. This whole scenario is not feeling too different. I think it’ll take a little longer, the IPO might be the real catalyst, or the monetisation and cannibalisation of the platform that comes from new owners afterwards. But it’s going to come.
Reddit sat for a very long time in the shadow of Digg until it made its final blunder. Lemmy’s communities will do the same, a dual-power in the wings waiting for a catalyst to come.
I was there and felt the same way about digg. My accounts on these platforms are not connected to my real life so I don’t care about abandoning them.
But I’m really excited about Lemmy because it’s not just a new site, it’s a protocol and standard so no one instance can control it all and you can switch instances without being locked out of the platform.
Lemmy has a different kind of potential compared to Mastodon and some of the other fediverse projects too. In my opinion Twitter’s rise was created by corporations and media jumping on board with it. It was directly promoted in the media promoting hashtags and the like for the things they were doing. The issue is that these corporate entities and their supporters in the media won’t jump on board with Mastodon as it’s an anti-corporate project.
Lemmy on the other hand? A platform for communities? Communities existed before reddit in the form of forums and it was reddit that disrupted that market, killing off forums. There is no requirement for corporate involvement in the success of Lemmy and communities can emerge and succeed entirely on their own. As long as people dual-use it for long enough for reddit to repeatedly create catalysts that send users here there is an inevitable future.
In the meantime it’s very important for people to make it good here on its own merit.
Out of all the platforms to leave, leaving Reddit was ridiculously easy. There’s zero lock in. I don’t care about preserving my post history. My account is not connected to my real life. My conversations were with strangers. Deleting my account meant nothing to me and I was using Reddit since the very beginning.
It’s not like Facebook where some events are only there and there are some people I can only contact there, and it’s not like email where I have all my accounts connected to it and all my contacts have that address. Reddit had literally zero lock in for me. I’m not missing it one bit. Lemmy has fulfilled everything I got from Reddit. Only issues is that it’s unstable from all the new load but so was Reddit when I first switched to that.
The hardest part of leaving reddit is the niche communities it fostered. If you could think of a topic there’s probably a fairly active subreddit (or two) following it. But that existed before reddit in the form of BBBs and lemmy looks to have a great path to recreate that.
The only thing reddit has ATM is users. Losing them is a huge blow to their value.
Omg I just popped into dig for 10 seconds and it’s so bad.
I was an avid user of yahoo chats. Those were my peak ‘get influenced by strangers’ period. Was 10 or something in those and on basic neopets. Yup we move on.