digg died fifteen years ago. clearly a lot has changed, and the mistakes that killed digg have not been made.
and i think reddit is beyond the point at which a digg-style fuckup could kill them. at worst you might see cadres of ideological users depart for something like lemmy, which is already happening to an extent, but there is a lot of space to flee internally, so most users don't feel the pressure. and diffusion to federated media is in the future for every mass audience. reddit has such a huge and active userbase it will dominate for the foreseeable future.
Reddit was popular but still very niche pre-Digg 4. Not unlike Slashdot. Digg's collapse rapidly transformed Reddit into something completely different, exemplified now by the celebrity AMAs and godawful crap on the front page.
Reddit did get a number of things right, but it still won't last. They may look back at killing /r/reddit.com as a huge mistake; once upon a time, people did really talk about Reddit as one big community, and there was some sense of that. That's not the case anymore.
I don't believe Reddit's demise will be like Digg's.
IMHO Digg was a success despite itself. Run more like a sophomoric Animal House [i] than a facebook or twitter. It was only a matter of time until it imploded.
Killing old.reddit.com would probably be their final Digg moment for me. Maybe they'll manage to keep the bulk of their users and keep some husk of it's former self going for a long time, but I'm gone. I suspect many others will join. The quality of content has been plummeting for years anyway.
Reddit attracted a much larger share of the normie vote than Digg ever did. Back when they were competitors, you could expect the average user was part of the fairly homogenous group of tech workers. They were better organized, more politically aligned, and generally more likely to be early adopters of new tech
That was a decade ago, and tech has become a lot more normalized since. Today's Reddit gets visibility on MM possibly more often than any site other than Google. Its users span the political spectrum, treat it as a utility, and for the most part never chose to come to Reddit, never critiqued it, and wouldn't notice if anything about it changed much. It's easy to imagine many modern users never make it off the front page.
I don't think Reddit will die like Digg did. It's the megaphone of the Internet, and could probably commit much worse transgressions than some random DRM technobabble before the common user would take notice.
I think the fact that the Reddit management got to witness the rapid death of Digg and rapid influx of users resulting from it let them learn a valuable lesson at Diggs expense (at just how fast your users can destory you if you piss them off).
One thing I wonder though is where Reddit users would go in the event of such a collapse. I'm not aware of an established site in this format that's available like Reddit was available when the Digg collapse happened.
Digg died not just because it was a redesign, but because it sold out as part of that redesign. Built into it was highlighting the content of media companies, and elevating it above the submissions by regular users.
Reddit has avoided getting bitten by this by selling out quietly behind the scenes. It has partnered with those same media companies and advertisers but it simply allows them to present themselves as regular users, or present their content in AMAs or other officially sanctioned channels.
Reddit has so far avoided Digg's big misstep; making it obvious to the users that they value the money from media companies more than the memes and other junk regular users make. But make no mistake, Reddit is currently in the same position Digg was in when everybody jumped ship. It's just too subtle for most Reddit users to notice.
Digg is 19 years old as well, and was significantly more popular than Reddit at its peak. Where is it now? Or Myspace? Or Tumblr? Or Google+? Or Twitter?
Any open forum that is private and profit-focused is eventually going to destroy itself. Reddit is not an exception, especially after its recent IPO. How long do you think it will be before investors are no longer content with losing hundreds of millions of dollars every year and want more monetization and more user-hostile features built in?
I posted this to HN to demonstrate that there's still room for a Reddit competitor, which is interesting.
People often reference Digg's power users as one source for the degradation of Digg. I think future conversations will also mention Reddit's moderators leading to the degradation of Reddit.
Maybe Reddit is a case of a system working just well enough that a competing system can't gain a foothold, like the music industry. On the other hand, with Reddit's recent actions against the wishes of the community, they may be passing their baton to a future upstart.
Reason Digg faded was that Reddit decentralized moderation across subreddits. Although there are still some global rules set by Reddit (no drug sourcing is one I personally disagree with).
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy is federated Reddit. It's also open source just lacks community. Some things are also already better like more performant front end. If I was to bet on something to overtake Reddit, it would probably be it.
Funnily enough the Reddit community originally started on Digg and moved there after Digg shot themselves in the foot in a similar way to what Reddit is currently doing. So while Reddit now is a lot bigger and more entrenched than Digg then, I wouldn't be at all surprised if history repeated.
Where else do you think the wave of reddit users will crash? Slashdot? Some federated assemblage like Mastodon or Lemmy? An indie clone trying to be to reddit what reddit was to digg? I'm guessing all of the above.
Reddit was quite popular before Digg failed. It didn't spring up over night. But yeah, something might replace Reddit one day. Getting there will be extraordinarily hard.
Digg.com’s implosion was so dramatic because Reddit was there to immediately start serving the same users just about the same thing. There are obviously plenty of other things Reddit users can do with their time, but there isn’t a monolith solution waiting in the wings to very closely replace Reddit with almost the exact same thing. Its destruction will be much more prolonged.
Not necessarily. Reddit was riding the coattails of Digg for a long time until Digg actively alienated it's user base with a redesign. Also, MySpace losing to Facebook.
I don't think it could happen today. Reddit has too much critical mass and the community is too diverse. Back then Digg was a smaller and more close-knit community of mostly techies that mostly agreed on the same things. There was a movement a few years ago where some Redditors tried to create a Reddit alternative called Voat, which ultimately failed.
and i think reddit is beyond the point at which a digg-style fuckup could kill them. at worst you might see cadres of ideological users depart for something like lemmy, which is already happening to an extent, but there is a lot of space to flee internally, so most users don't feel the pressure. and diffusion to federated media is in the future for every mass audience. reddit has such a huge and active userbase it will dominate for the foreseeable future.
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