Now Reddit are coming for the individual personal subreddits

> That said, perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here.

Very little, and almost none from a technical POV. What value Reddit does provide is a side effect of 17 years of investments by users, their communities, and those communities' unpaid moderators.

Yes, Reddit is free to attack the foundation of their value for short-term gain. However, the reality is that Reddit has never been easier to replace than it is right now. If even a relatively small percentage of users/communities/moderators take their toys and go elsewhere, it could trigger an irreversible decline.

> Very little, and almost none from a technical POV

I mean, I can sign up and log in. That's more than I can say for the federated competitors I tried so hard to use and finally gave up on.

The fact that none of Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or TikTok tried to go for Reddit's throat in this lull implies we might be missing something.

On the contrary, I see Reddit as being extremely difficult to replace, precisely because of those 17 years of investment by users. Reddit is a gold mine of information related to any topic you can imagine, and that information won't magically migrate to another platform without serious network traction by a large user base.

See you in Discord.. after I give them my phone number and figure out how to discover your niche community.. then read through how to join.. which chat room do I type some obscure message into to prove I read the rules in order for a bot to approve me and wait 15 minutes before getting into a welcome chat room where I now need to introduce myself? How do I get access to what it was I was looking for?

God forbid I ask a question that’s been asked before. If only there was some way to archive and search what I was looking for in the first place.

Wake me up when I can google site:discord.com

The thing you are missing is that Reddit is not (sufficiently) profitable. :)

Reddit is pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars and that number has been rapidly increasing.

They would have easily reached profitability without doing this.

This neatly summarizes why anybody should care. I found Reddit to be very like the glory days of Usenet. There were lots of bad places, but then the niche content was excellent.

It would be a pity to lose Reddit. I don't know if that's what must happen: it's not up to me.

I am taking no side on this, as I don't have enough visibility in the topic. But do I think this answer is unfairly discounting the cost of running the company, both human and financial.

Building and running a software company is not free.

Yes but would they reach the 30% YoY growth in perpetuity we consider mandatory in the modern economy? Fast may seem good but it's actually slow when compared to the fastest horses. Every company must be a unicorn, so sayeth the investors.

It would probably be profitable if they didn’t employ 2000 people to run what is in essence a large but relatively basic forum system.

I don't think discord is a valid replacement. One of the best parts of reddit was the easily browsable/searchable Forum like threading. Where there are communities for a given theme, and threads branching off of that group. Discord is great for realtime chat, but a significant pain for async conversations. In general for information access I personally don't like to search through chats because the threading is too shallow, and conversations are had at the root, aka group level.

> On the contrary, I see Reddit as being extremely difficult to replace, precisely because of those 17 years of investment by users.

I said its "never been easier to replace", which is different than "easy to replace".

If Reddit continues to drive its most invested users and moderators off the platfrom, it becomes significantly easier. But even with continued bad choices by leadership, Reddit will likely follow the Flickr path: Gently coasting into irrelevance, selling itself once or twice along the way.

My prediction: Reddit will ultimately be bought for its corpse^H^H^H^H^H corpus of text content, and so will live forever through LLMs. People of 2073 will wonder why their bots occasionally reply, "Thanks for the gold, kind stranger!"

It's a bit of both. The wealth of knowledge in Reddit would be extremely difficult to replace. But that history isn't exactly what keeps people on reddit or helps perpetuate the platform, it's just a valuable goldmine of information.

That history doesn't keep the platform going though. People and networks will migrate to a new platform, start building a new knowledge base, and reddit will slowly rot

I used to use Reddit for this purpose, but many of the things I’d try to look up on Reddit, I can more readily ask ChatGPT about. This form of network effect of reddit will likely weaken over time.

Edit: So in some sense all that information has magically migrated to a new platform through the mystical power of DL.

kbin.social and lemmy.world are starting to get traction in the "fediverse". I think they're probably far more viable long term solutions to the reddit problem. That would never have been needed if Reddit didn't insist on shooting their own foot.

They should definitely be paid for that.

But reddit was working just fine in 2017, when they had less than 200 employees (compared to their pandemic hiring from 700 up to 2000) and it was working fine at smaller numbers before then. Right now their revenue is about half a billion dollars. They take in more than enough money to run the site and have stupendous profits.

And ChatGPT will write all of this up https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/14fupdk/dock_... for you. Absolutely. I can see that happening. Even the opening of it which is just a recital of various standards, well compare to https://chat.openai.com/share/bbb32735-26c7-48c7-9293-a33020... this. It says "If your USB-C port supports DisplayPort Alt Mode or HDMI Alt Mode" we know it does not support HDMI alt mode because that's a paper only standard, there were never any implementations of it and the HDMI Forum this January killed it. ChatGPT didn't mention HBR2, HBR3, DSC, MST all of which are vital to understand the problem.

I am mentioning this only because I wrote this today and even as someone as knowledgeable about USB C as anyone possibly can, there are big unknowns here and automated aggregation of knowledge could help. But it doesn't.

But you know what, I actually asked ChatGPT for this, it recommends a dual monitor DisplayLink (!!) dock for this case. Complete trash. It concludes with "on such cases, it's recommended to consult with a hardware specialist" without telling you how to do that.

https://chat.openai.com/share/517b831b-db36-40c3-b7bf-7c1c0e...

But let's not tout my own horn. I just moved to Malta and I already knew the selection will be low and I will need to shop all over the EU and get the packages sent with a package forwarder. Now, the /r/malta sub recommends shipmybox and shiplowcost both of which are Malta destination only, focused on this special market, reliable and relatively cheap -- and near impossible to find via Googling. ChatGPT recommends shipito, myus and forward2me all of which are global companies. It's not much better than Googling especially given the forward2me reviews on ... guess what, Reddit.

When I ask ChatGPT about that it says "Forward2Me has generally received positive reviews and is considered a reliable package forwarding service" but https://www.reddit.com/r/amiibo/comments/xzlnsh/does_anyone_... https://www.reddit.com/r/internationalshopper/comments/ucww6... there are worrying reviews

https://chat.openai.com/share/0e14cf2c-8a19-4210-97aa-2a90a3...

How many more you want?

> would they reach the 30% YoY growth in perpetuity we consider mandatory in the modern economy

Straw man. If you tell investors you'll grow at 30% YoY for the foreseeable future, and raise money on that premise, you can't turn around after failing to deliver and blame "the modern economy." Plenty of businesses–most of our economy–run on low-growth or steady-state business models.

The whole world needs to slow down and take a breath.

> which chat room do I type some obscure message into to prove I read the rules in order for a bot to approve me and wait 15 minutes before getting into a welcome chat room where I now need to introduce myself?

This phase was really irritating, but luckily discord realised that was needed as a feature so made a first-party feature where you accept the rules / TOS for a given server.

The bots also got better, so usually you just need to respond with an emoji for automatic role assignment in discords where that matters too.

It's all already archived. The platform has severely harmed knowledge generation. That's why they are trying to take back the subreddits. But they are only pushing the small group of knowledge givers further away.

> migrate to another platform

I don't think this is the biggest threat. Twitter, being a unitary platform, mainly has to worry about other platforms, or protocols that masquerade as single platforms.

But Reddit is built up of many communities. The 17 years of history is pretty valuable to Reddit, Inc, of course. Lots of long-tail search eyeballs. But the people actually generating that valuable information are generally focused on the latest discussion, not the history. I think the threat here is the various communities going other places. One by one or in pieces, scattered across many sites and tools.

As a proof of concept here, look at patriots.win, birthed from /r/The_Donald: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald#Patriots.win

It's just not that hard to set up an online forum. Reddit captured those many communities because it was even easier, and because Reddit Inc acted as good stewards. We'll see how this plays out, but I could easily see Reddit being permanently diminished due to its execs unintentionally triggering an open-web rebirth of the independent forum.

I actually believe this is one of the reasons Reddit (and its alternatives) will never reach their peaks again. Too many want to take, not many want to give their valuable information.

What this essentially boils down to, is AI will then process everything easily accessible and "low quality" (your tech purchase recommendations for example), and everything more valuable will be locked behind communities that invest resources into creating barriers to entry.

This isn't new of course, Patreon is an example of this. Discord also has private channels too, to indicate this is a common pattern that will only increase. Reddit knows this as well, hence their rushed attempts at locking down access.

Basically, get used to having to put in work for information you want and can't find through chatbots!

Is it really that hard for someone who browses hackernews to get set up on a federated platform? I'm over here assuming that everyone on this forum that complains about how hard it is to run a startup should be able to run the docker compose and route a reverse proxy to their own instance, rather than take the 5 minutes to read about how the fediverse and activity pub works and find an instance they like offering free access.

I get that it is not a ubiquitous solution, but after my experiences on mastodon.social and others, I'm really starting to wonder just how genuine the sentiment behind "it's hard to sign up" is. It's not that hard at all - I have found it a lot easier than doing something like creating a modern facebook or google account for instance.

Yet we won’t lose that history if Reddit loses its users and mods. New history will be found in the same place as old - surfaced via Google (discord excluded).

> On the contrary, I see Reddit as being extremely difficult to replace, precisely because of those 17 years of investment by users. Reddit is a gold mine of information related to any topic you can imagine, and that information won't magically migrate to another platform without serious network traction by a large user base.

It doesn't have to. An archive won't save Reddit if the action wants to move elsewhere.

If a particular topical community gets going somewhere else, the most popular information will quickly get recreated just through its normal operation.

My comment was mostly about the current trend. In just 4 years we went from GPT-2 to GPT-4, and the pace seems accelerating. Only a fool points to the limits of current technology to make claims about future technology, the less foolish look at trend lines. The even less foolish have causal models, but even in this case, ChatGPT’s user trendline is faster growing than Reddit’s. Though this tells you little about whether they’re substitutes.

Users. Users produce the value, not Reddit. They create or share the content and submit comments to invoke discussion. This is what draws more users to the platform.

Reddit is a grumpy office landlord that thinks that because it's glued some shitty plastic panels to the wall to "modernize" that it can rock up to the whiteboard and pretend it's one of the creatives. They are terrible at understanding the product because the real product was built around their mediocre foundations.

>> would they reach the 30% YoY growth in perpetuity we consider mandatory in the modern economy

> Straw man. If you tell investors you'll grow at 30% YoY for the foreseeable future, and raise money on that premise, you can't turn around after failing to deliver and blame "the modern economy." Plenty of businesses–most of our economy–run on low-growth or steady-state business models.

Not exactly. The rest of the economy may run on "low-growth or steady-state business models," but the VC investors that control funding for technology businesses demand "30% YoY growth in perpetuity." It's a cultural problem.

Just because we might be tech-savvy doesn't mean we have an affinity for jumping through hoops that we don't think are worth it.

> the VC investors that control funding for technology businesses

Reddit was held by a media company, Condé Naste. It chose to raise growth equity from VCs, among others. In summary,

It's still not an absurdly profitable venture even if you drop head count to 300-500 which is likely a reasonable number. A lot of people could have good careers in that smaller reddit, but it's not a multi-billion dollar unicorn.

> Wake me up when I can google site:discord.com

I agree. I'm not a huge superfan of Reddit, but it does occasionally have nuggets of great user-generated content. Moving that content over to some site that is walled off from the Internet and un-searchable would be a huge blow for the open Internet.

Reddit is an open sewer, but I can at least stand over an open sewer and look at what's in it. Discord and Facebook and their ilk are underground vaults.

That still seems high for what Reddit is. I would have expected them to have 50-100 employees at most.

I'm happy it's happening. Putting ownership back in the community's hands is a huge win for the freedom and diversity of the internet.

I agree, but it's a lot more work, and each individual federated instance has a lot of control and data. It's definitely better, but you'd still need to migrate content if your instance owner goes ape.

Too bad we can't (won't?) all just go back to Usenet.

I've been working on a platform with a bit of a different take on the online community space. It's like a Reddit/Discord/Patreon hybrid taking the best features of each platform and combining them. One key aspect is we have non-intrusive monetization methods baked into each community where the revenue primarily goes to the community owners. The monetization stuff is completely optional and disabled by default, however it feels like the people curating the communities should have the option to be rewarded for the work that they do.

Here's an example of a community:

https://sociables.com/community/VidSocial/board/trending

You're right that discord is shit, but the web used to be filled with forums that did everything reddit does just as well, but simply were not as popular.

Consolidating all of those forums in a single place was nice. I'll credit reddit with that. They also eventually implemented their own image/video hosting after imgur became the very evil it was created to put right, and while reddit's image/video presentation is obnoxious in its own ways it was still an improvement and a valuable feature that they shipped with success.

Other than that, reddit didn't bring anything new to the table. Worse, the things it should have improved on the technical side have been largely neglected. Search on reddit has never not been useless. The UI has always been a mess (and the redesign is so much worse), and mod tools were so bad that third parties ended up creating solutions while reddit did nothing.

The best thing reddit had going for it, and the thing that caused it to become popular in the first place, was the freedom it gave users, but after years of increasing censorship, a total lack of integrity in how they enforce rules, and an unwillingness to implement features users and mods have been asking for a whole lot of reddit was hoping an alternative would come along long before any of this most recent drama.

Reddit had a good thing, but neglect and mismanagement ruined it. They're just coasting on inertia and that slows with every act of petty bullshit users run into. A lot of redditors are just looking for a safe place to jump off so they continue their conversations in peace.

OK let me be simple

It will always be garbage

This is a hype road. There's nothing. There never will be anything.

It's just automated plagiarism.

The advantage of Reddit is genuinely new content which this method can't ever create.

>after I give them my phone number and figure out how to discover your niche community

never had to give them my phone number. Depends on the server, I suppose.

And as someone used to exploring niche communities: TBH, it's not as out of the way to google as I thought. say I want to find the godot discord group (if they have one)... yup first entry, can find a public Godot discord. Maybe not official, but I wouldn't google for an official discord so much as find community link on a website.

>God forbid I ask a question that’s been asked before. If only there was some way to archive and search what I was looking for in the first place.

TBH Reddit isn't exactly better off here, despite being searchable. People don't search so that's why you get subs asking the same questions every week.

>This neatly summarizes why anybody should care.

if people value it, they would move to a site that cares about it. But it seems people value community the most, and the only options with large community is Discord, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Tiktok (maybe a half dozen others, but not many more than what I listed).

You pick your poison. Discord is definitely the best of those alternatives in my eyes. FB/Instagram/Tiktok aren't meant at all for text, and Twitter has never been for long form discussion.

Agreed, people chose once again to centralize instead of diversfy, and as history has shown time and time again: we're paying for it right now.

At this point I blame no one but the users. Clearly the layman just wants a quick place to chat, so I understand why Discord is popular. The masses don't care about searching up info years later.

The one advantadge I can (not so) proudly say I've learned from years of digging through the mucks of the internet for various kinds of NSFW media. You don't get the info easily, no one wants to advertise it even if you wanted to. sometimes the info isn't even for free. You either spend a lot of time finding some truly backwater forums with nuggest of gold, or pay someone who's dug that deep to curate for you.

If people don't want to make the next reddit... well welcome to my world.

>The advantage of Reddit is genuinely new content

you should tell that to reddtors. I believe they complain quite a bit about reposts, the same questions being asked, bots, and more.

Agreed, but I'm also confused. I made a kbin and lemmy.world account about as easily as I would a reddit account. Are the servers still impacted for some?

The new UI and general idea of federation takes some figuring out, but the high level experience of "see a post, click, read comments, comment" isn't any different from Hackernews.

Centralization removes a massive barrier though. We want content, and control over that content, distributed and preserved (usually), but we also want everything in one easy to access location. Having to find out about, sign up for, and separately visit 100+ unique websites running phpBB, vBulletin, or something else, then logging into each site with their own usernames and passwords several times a day is a lot of work. Subscribing to 100+ subreddits and hitting the refresh button on one website was easy and mostly worked pretty well. A single interface/client/login for everything is ideal. What we really need is a new usenet.

Some != all

Stochastic parrot: inherently no new content

Reddit: some new content.

The bigger issue, UX signup and discoverability issues aside, is that moving from Reddit to Discord is just trading one capricious corporate owner for another.

> Consolidating all of those forums in a single place was nice.

Was it, though?

Sure, I'm not going to minimize the benefits of discoverability, avoiding the need for users to create yet another account, and taking the burden of infra maintenance off of someone who'd otherwise have to stand up a server to host phpBB or whatever.

But ultimately we don't strictly need these things. Isolated/fragmented web forums were doing just fine before Reddit came along. Maybe adding a little friction to the process of a first post to a new forum is a feature, not a bug.

> Reddit had a good thing, but neglect and mismanagement ruined it.

Yes and no. Ultimately, any time you hitch your community to someone else's platform, you incur the large risk that the platform owners will make changes that you don't like. It's not even "neglect and mismanagement": Reddit's owners have been doing what they believe increases the value of Reddit. Whether they're wrong or right about what changes accomplish that ultimately doesn't matter: those changes might not be what makes users and moderators happy, and users and moderators don't have much power to affect change. This protest/blackout may end up achieving the desired effect, but think of the time, energy, and effort wasted around all of it. Better to spend that time working on solutions that allow communities to own their slice of the platform, and have final say as to what happens with it.

I'm sure there's new content on Tumblr too, even if we'd veer the opposite way and say that "Tumblr has nothing", which is equally exaggeratory.

So, what's the line? How much noise are we welling to dig through to find "some new content"? I'd argue reddit has enough noise to at least bring the question up.

> We want content, and control over that content

in context of reddit, we clearly do not value that control at all. these last few weeks have shown how much control we truly have.

>Having to find out about, sign up for, and separately visit 100+ unique websites running phpBB, vBulletin, or something else, then logging into each site with their own usernames and passwords several times a day is a lot of work.

we solved that problem decades ago, though. I think even Reddit has RSS feed support (well, for now. I don't think it's native). I think leaving the centralizing to an underlying format is a better approach than expecting a benevelent dictator to always look into the best interests of the user while also seeking profits (or alternatively, an eccentric billionaire who cares not about profits).

Some inconvenience of signing up with an account is short term, and not exactly a huge barrier to begin with. I made 3 new accounts this week on various alternatives, barely took 10 minutes total.

I’ve tried to use discord a million times and always fail because of this.

> if people value it, they would move to a site that cares about it.

Admins value single login and anti-spam. Plain and simple.

I am perfectly capable of running a foum, bulletin board, Discourse, whatever.

What I am NOT capable of handling are secure logins and anti-spam. Everybody is heading to Discord simply because Discord handles those two problems for you.

The problem is that centralization allows you amortize the cost of handling those two issues. Decentralized systems that don't handle those two things will never catch on.

Revenue in 2017 was $50mm. So in the last six years, their headcount has grown 10x, and their revenue has grown 10x. Hmm…

Then host your own instance. That's actually more work, but worth it if you don't trust whomever is hosting your community. Should become fairly straightforward once you have parties taking care of the technical details (there probably are already some).

Not sure what else is 'a lot more work'?

> > Consolidating all of those forums in a single place was nice.

> Was it, though?

The great thing about Reddit is how it removes almost any friction from creating and joining new „forums“. The less friction or transaction cost you have the better. Without Reddit I’m not sure we’d have dedicated forums of people posting their grilled cheese sandwiches or Babylon 5 GIFs

"The graveyards are full of people the world could not do without."

At the very least, Reddit provides the servers. That's not nothing.

Indeed.

Plus, I subscribe to about 30 subreddits, most of which pretty niche. Could I replace them with forums? Sure, and I do have fond memories from phpbb forums around the turn of the millenium, even moderating a few as a teen.

But then I'd have to check about 5-10 different forum sites daily, each with subforums for different specific topics. It adds friction.

It's much more convenient just opening reddit whenever I have a few minutes to scroll my feed and see what's up in my niche communities.

Reddit also gives the power to users to create niche communities. R/xbiking comes to mind, which is about a very specific bicycling subculture consisting of using vintage mountain bike frames from the 80s and 90s with a mix of modern and vintage parts to create cool all around bikes... Sort of. Anyways, to my knowledge this subculture did not exist anywhere before Reddit, and I can hardly see how it could have sprung up on bikeforums.net, for example. Petitioning the forums admins for a new subforum for a community that hardly existed would have been difficult, and the sort of posts R/xbiking sees would probably have been closed as offtopic in other subforums. Much easier to create and organically grow a new community on Reddit.

Personally, after being a bit reticent, I am now hopeful for fediverse based solutions (kbin and Lemmy notably) to replace this.

But the site has not changed.

Are all those people sales? If no, then those workers seem like mostly a waste of money. If yes, and they're still not profitable, then turning the company into 90+% sales is not the path to profitability either.

Do you have any non-sales explanation for what those people are doing that actually contributes to revenue?

It's not like they opened more factories and need more workers.

Though maybe they look at increased revenue and use that as the reason to hire more people because growth good, in which case any complaints about lack of profitability should be derisively laughed at.

A good few subs have already quite fluidly moved over to lemmy. Sure, you're not taking the archives with you, but if that's really what you're after, surely you can afford the price of "free" for wget.