[db0] Reddit is a dead site running
[db0] Reddit is a dead site running
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 th...
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 was on reddit much longer than myspace and I still miss myspace more than reddit. lemmy definitely reminds me of the early days of many social network sites. reddit was just noisy programers faking users at the beginning.....so perhaps we do that with our content again... I wonder if I spin up a lemmy instance If I can have midi playing on my page again?
since I’ve started using Lemmy full-time, I’ve seen the improvement in engagement and quality in real time.
This, more than anything happening at Reddit, demonstrates to me that people are leaving Reddit in droves.
Just weeks ago, Lemmy was slow, quiet place; it was rarely worth visiting more than once a day in terms of new posts. Since the Reddit protest, Lemmy has had a sea-change in volume, and that bespeaks a major migration.
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.
First of all, I cannot speak for the current state of Reddit myself because I literally never go there anymore.
I’ve been here for 5 days, and from my experience is this platform has gained a lot of traction even in that short timeframe. Hopefully it just doesn’t level off and then die suddenly.
Most importantly though, this article hit on the nose of what my opinion is on what made Reddit great… great 3rd party platforms (I loved Apollo) and the moderation/customization of its subreddits. Everything was so hands off. Both of those are gone now. Reddit killed off the very things that made it unique and so good.
In my 7 years on Reddit, I’d say over the last two-ish years we have slowly been seeing that leave. So many subs got shut down, and some definitely were questionable at best, but in it, Reddit organic feel and freedom. At first it was only the worst of the worst subs, but slowly more and more left. Not to mention moderation was being done by a shrinking number of people and it seemed the echo chamber in each individual sub got worse.
Some changes were directly administration’s fault, others indirect to varying degrees.
I’d argue Reddit has slowly been killing itself for awhile now, it’s just that the latest changes are the most abrupt, direct, and significant.
Just waiting on some subs to start moving here. But yeah I’ve seen huge decreases even in the volume of posts. The quality of comments has also gone off a cliff. I think the most engaged users were a tiny subset.
Definitely lost the rational and measured discussion crowd although they were always shrinking as a percentage. It’s even more outrage and dumb hot takes now.
IMO it is like the foundations of the building have been undermined , I do agree with the author , even if reddit looks ok numbers wise the heart and soul has been removed.
There’s now significant bitterness and hostility,
Yes, I’ve noticed this more than ever in the last year or two, it simply is not pleasant to interact with people on reddit anymore. Old accounts stopped posting months or years ago, new accounts either don’t take it seriously (therefor making the entire experience an empty and frustrating exercise in trolling) or use it purely to make bad faith arguments about politics.
Don’t get me wrong, reddit’s never been exactly a bastion of highminded discourse but right now it’s positively vile.
Permanently Deleted
"Reddit has reached terminal enshittification and the only thing left for it to do, is die."
👍
Reddit might go on for a number of years. Maybe with a continually decreasing amount of users, engagement and value, but until the fediverse is able to accumulate the knowledge base contained on Reddit, it will still be my primary knowledge base. I cannot wait for the day when I can scrub ' Site : reddit.com' from my Google search bar. Edit:spelling errors
Good riddance.
I’m optimistic, but I’m not seeing this in my experience, yet. Sure, the “front page” of Lemmy is good enough to keep me off Reddit. However, most of the individual pop culture communities I participate in are super active on Reddit and pretty much dead on Lemmy. For instance: /r/onepiece vs the multiple communities on Lemmy. That subreddit often has more comments on posts than members of the Lemmy communities.
