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’m OK with the full repost. It’s not like I’m running adverts 😁
Good to know! Thank you!
Tbh, on mobile your page’s not really readable with the double citation thing, so I’m glad that you are relaxed with the repost. Thanks!
Ye that’s annoying. I’ll see if there’s any sort of fix
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.
I mean, Digg is still up and running…
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.
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).
leaving old.reddit alone for so many years
Except they killed part of the old reddit experience earlier this year, when they decommissioned i.reddit
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 joined Lemmy 2 years ago and it was pretty much a desert, except for communities like privacy. I left after asking for a feature (a local intance feed, which has been implemented a while back!), because there wasn’t much else to do. Almost forgot about it until the whole reddit fiasco happened. I’m now so thrilled that threaded discussions are taking off in the fediverse!
I was really active on reddit, especially in a local city community. Answering tourist’s questions, posting local news, engaging in many conversations. I knew the regular’s usernames, I am sure many recognized mine. I haven’t posted since I’ve left and it honestly hurts a little, but I can’t go back anymore. Reddit is dead, it just doesn’t realize it yet. I’m happy to be a part of building Lemmy up.
I joined 3 years ago when I first heard about it in a zealous enthusiasm for open source projects, but quickly I realised it was just too small of a community for proper engagement - and the communities that were there felt a bit impenetrable with more close-knit and small userbases.
Now I can use Lemmy like I used reddit, for (reading and participating in) discussions with a semi-anonymous crowd on a multitude of topics and for looking at silly memes. And the future so far only looks more promising when it comes to the multitude part of topics available to discuss.
theres enough of us here now to make lemmy viable, we’re over the hump of any social media of getting enough people on that you can browse all day and still have real content.
I had my first “What time is it?!?” moment a couple days ago while browsing lemmy. Hours had passed, and I didn’t even notice.
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.
I’ve been checking Reddit once in a while. Mostly to archive a few things here and there, as people mention them in this sub. I feel like db0 is spot on, when talking about how the place is now bitter and hostile (it was already this way, but even more now). The current events were “just enough” to get rid of any sort of cooperativeness that you’d feel on the site before.
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.
or use it purely to make bad faith arguments about politics.
How much did Hillary pay you to type this from Hunter Biden’s laptop?
That’s a serious example of laughable responses I’ve received on Reddit. I received them often enough to eventually completely block all political sites from my feed over there.
reddit’s never been exactly a bastion of highminded discourse
It had some subs and users that were generally nice and fun to interact with, but it has been a constant battle to keep the trolls out of the garden. With people now haven lesser tools to fight and lesser people that want a pleasant experience for all I could imagine those patches of joy would dry out. But now we’re here and I’m all for making the best out of it.
This is becoming like the “dead MMO” meme. Just because you no longer use it doesn’t mean it’s dead.
I think that it’s different. The author identifies two core points responsible for the popularity of the platform. And it’s easy to see why they’re so important:
- open API → third party devs coding features to use with the platform → higher user experience → higher user retention
- hands-off approach to community → Reddit being used in ways that the community managers didn’t expect → Reddit more suitable for a wider audience → larger potential market
By killing those two things Reddit might make some short-term profit, but it’ll be at expense of the value of the platform and associated company. Once that value goes too low, the profit margin itself will go down, encouraging further measures, that in turn will degrade its value even further.
Using MMOs as analogy what the Reddit devs did was to remove core mechanics essential for the main gameplay cycle, and left the players only with the optional quests and minigames. Even if you don’t really care about the core gameplay, you’ll eventually get bored, and leave. No sane game dev would do this, and yet that’s what Reddit did.
There’s an additional factor db0 didn’t mention through this text, that I believe to be essential for Reddit’s “aliveness”: user trust. It’s hard to measure, but it’s what prompts users to “play along” the platform and other users, explaining the bitterness and hostility - because for your typical user, everyone besides himself is “part of the platform”. And this tends to create a vicious cycle, since hostile interactions make people trust a platform even less.
