The link contains db0’s views on the ongoing state of Reddit, and I think that it’s worth sharing here - both to document a piece of opinion, and as food for thought. The main points are:
- a comparison between the current state of Reddit vs. Myspace near collapse;
- the illusion that everything is fine based on “raw” numbers like engagement;
- that Reddit was never a “good” site, but it had two positive points (open API and hands-off approach to communities), destroyed by the current events;
- the ongoing progression of the Fediverse as alternative to Reddit;
- the change in quality in both the content and the behaviour of the people still there.
The text mentions an article from Cory Doctorow. I’ve copied it to a pastebin, in case someone can’t access it.
EDIT: I hope that the author doesn’t mind, but I’ll copy the contents of the article inside the spoilers below. Hopefully for mobile users it’ll be a bit more accessible.
Reddit is a dead site running
from July 10, 2023
Yesterday I read the excellent article by Cory Doctorow: Let the Platforms Burn and this particular anecdote
"The thing is, network effects are a double-edged sword. People join a service to be with the people they care about. But when the people they care about start to leave, everyone rushes for the exits. Here’s danah boyd, describing the last days of Myspace:
If a central node in a network disappeared and went somewhere else (like from MySpace to Facebook), that person could pull some portion of their connections with them to a new site. However, if the accounts on the site that drew emotional intensity stopped doing so, people stopped engaging as much. Watching Friendster come undone, I started to think that the fading of emotionally sticky nodes was even more problematic than the disappearance of segments of the graph.
With MySpace, I was trying to identify the point where I thought the site was going to unravel. When I started seeing the disappearance of emotionally sticky nodes, I reached out to members of the MySpace team to share my concerns and they told me that their numbers looked fine. Active uniques were high, the amount of time people spent on the site was continuing to grow, and new accounts were being created at a rate faster than accounts were being closed. I shook my head; I didn’t think that was enough. A few months later, the site started to unravel.
This is exactly what is happening to Reddit currently. The most passionate contributors, the most tech-literate users, and the integrators who make all the free tools in the ecosystem around reddit which makes that service much more valuable have left and will never look back.
From the dashboards of u/spez however, things might looks great. Better even! As the drama around their decision making certainly caused a lot more posts and interactions, and the loss of the 3rd party apps drove at least a few users to the official applications.
But this is an illusion. Like MySpace before them, the metric might look good, but the soul of the site has been lost. It’s not easy to explain but since I’ve started using Lemmy full-time, I’ve seen the improvement in engagement and quality in real time. half a month ago, posts could barely pass 2 digits, now they regularly break 3 and sometimes 4 digits. And the quality of the discussions is a pleasure to go through.
I said it before, but reddit was never a particularly good site. Their saving grace was the openness of their API and their hands-off approach to communities. The two things they just destroyed. It’s those 3rd party tools and communities that made reddit like it is. As as the ecosystem around reddit sputters and dies, the one around the Threadiverse is progressing in an astonishing rate.
Not only are the integrators coming from reddit aware what kind of bots and tools are going to be very useful, but a lot of those tools are shut off from reddit and switched to the lemmy API instead, explicitly cannibalizing the quality of the reddit experience. And due to the completely open API of the Threadiverse, those tools now get access to unparalleled access and power.
Sure if you visit reddit currently, you’ll see people talking and voting, but as someone who’s been there from the start, the quality has fallen off a hill and is reaching terminal velocity. But it feels like one’s still flying!
Not just the quality of the posts where only the most superficial meme stuff can rise to the top, not just the quality of the discussion, but even mere vibe of the discussions is just lost.
There’s now significant bitterness and hostility, especially as the mods who were responsible for maintaining the quality, have gone or are being hands off or just don’t have the tools needed to keep up. I’ve heard from multiple people who are leaving even while they were not originally planning to, because the people left over in reddit are just so toxic.
This is a very vicious cycle which will accelerate the demise of that site even further.
A house fire can go from a spark to a raging inferno in less than a minute. The flames consuming reddit are just now climbing up the curtains and it still appears manageable, but it’s already too late. Reddit has reached terminal enshittification and the only thing left for it to do, is die.
I think reddit will keep going for awhile longer, mainly just because of how big it is
But the damage has definitely been done, and the problem is I don’t believe reddit has any capability of patching up the damage long-term. Everything still looks good now, but it’s not like Twitter immediately looked bad when Elon got it either. Instead we’ll see them continuously, over and over, having to fix things that looking back were caused by this.
Once a number of the smaller hobby communities have their bases move offsite, it will be a big blow to reddit. I think it’s those types of groups that would be more likely to stick around. You can find political commentary anywhere, but finding a group that can answer your questions about a niche hobby is only in a few places, and chances are high that the subreddit ended up killing the old forum for it.
I think Google de-prioritising Reddit search results is huge.
It was my go-to secret. Try and find a specific solution/recommendation/review, I’d see what comes up normally then add “Reddit” and check out some threads.
Normally, the Reddit threads would have the gem I needed for my problem/question.
Now, I’m faced with private communities or deleted posts. And - although it makes my googling harder - I’m all for it. I find myself adding “-reddit” now so I don’t get juked by search result caches.
I gave knowledge to that site. I gave my experiences within niche communities. I’d reply when someone asks a question on my post/comment a few years later.
That’s over for me.
There is a long term lasting damage that they have done to themselves.
I used to do the same thing. I found that adding “forum” in place of “reddit” brings up more community answers on more websites. I hope it works for your stuff like it’s worked for mine
Yeah it’s pretty weird actually going to different sites for answers and information. I mean, I feel more informed on my decisions now atheist. Before I used to just go with the top reddit comment like 80% of the time.
db0 didn’t explore further on the types of damage caused by the current events, but once we do, IMO it’s clear that you’re right - there’s no way for Reddit to patch it up.
The main damage is that Reddit hit the trust thermocline. It has been abusing the trust of the userbase for a really long time, but the 3PAs and its “users? mods? nah, fuck them” approach that made plenty users go from “I trust this site enough to contribute with it” to “contribute??? with Reddit? Hell no!”.
And it’s funny because Reddit Inc. seems to be (historically) hellbent on avoiding the same mistakes as Digg did with v4 (where changes in interface pissed users and made them left), for example leaving old.reddit alone for so many years… just to do the exact same mistake as Digg did in the big picture (v4 didn’t cause the Digg exodus alone - it was v4 plus everything before it).
Except they killed part of the old reddit experience earlier this year, when they decommissioned i.reddit
Digg is still around… but it’s nothing like it used to be. Reddit will do the same.
I mean, Digg is still up and running…
Lycos does too. Tripod as well. But does it mean anything? Going back to your ex feels always weird.
Splintering communities suffer from major attrition events that lower their value. We already have a model for where Twitter and Reddit are going – FB. Compared with 10 years ago it is a graveyard. If it weren’t for their ownership of IG, it would be far worse for them. It is now a site for older people and for an awful lot of fake accounts. Twitter and Reddit are headed this same direction, but it’s probably a 2-3 year timeline before it is really obvious. More generally, the model of centralized social media has already peaked. I am not disputing that they will still have large user bases but there will be a slow grinding down.