I wonder if there's a startup opportunity in helping online communities avoid the Eternal September effect. Some would claim reddit has solved the problem (subreddits) but others would disagree, citing front-page quality decline. So it seems to be an unsolved, universal problem right now.
My understanding of Eternal September is that it's basically used to argue that higher traffic inevitably leads to lower quality of discussion, correct?
Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I do feel like platforms could improve to better foster higher quality discussion, or at least better tailor users to see the type of content they enjoy, which is what I mentioned at the end of the article. It doesn't seem like there's been much innovation in that department, especially since Reddit virtually has a monopoly so there's not really much incentive for them to change anything.
I think part of the problem is that reddit seems to really aggressively push for subreddit growth. This artificially creates an "eternal september" almost everywhere. I'm not really sure why they are pushing this so hard, if it's to show investors how fast reddit is growing or something?
But bottom line is that perhaps the single most disruptive event an online community can experience is a large sustained influx of new members. It just will not be the same before and after.
Psh, do you even know what time the narwhal bacons? /s
I think Reddit is interesting because its design is more resistant to Eternal September than other communities. See the trend of creating r/TrueX when r/X gets Septembered.
Unfortunately, this hits diminishing returns when more and more obscure subreddits need to be created. Tons of oddly specific niche subreddits have popped up and completely gone to shit in a flash. I think we're nearly due for the next migration (maybe a federated alternative?).
Reddit is Digging its own grave. Eternal September awaits all the old school forums that still remain. But perhaps that decentralization will be a good thing in the end.
I think the network effects of Reddit are a lot easier to undo than that of Twitter. There is little core functionality that didn’t exist in forum software from the Naughties.
Reddit uses machine learning models to maximize engagement. This ruins any of the forum-like qualities reddit had. It’s gross.
Every subreddit is constantly in the process of eternal September, which kills the dynamics of getting to know one another that were common on forums.
Social media that is good cannot have advertising and cannot be an algorithmic Skinner box that maximizes engagement.
I am starting to think of competing with Facebook as creating online tribes that are costly, perhaps even financially very costly, but full of rich directed action. Sometimes like the dynamics of a church, where users are collated into tribes of limited size.
Someone will solve it and replace reddit in at least some profound ways.
Doubtful. These are deep-seated patterns that have been playing out in online communities for decades, and every "oh we'll just build a new thing that won't have that problem" attempt has... had the same problems.
For examples, and some interesting thoughts on the issue, start here:
Regarding the "decline" of Reddit: any site that gets 2 billion monthly page views is going to be wholly different from its incipient form of several years ago. Surely the users of Reddit who pine for its past have many alternatives today.
You're answering to a comment about a people/platform problem at Reddit with a technical issue at Reddit. While both are maybe true, one is easy to fix (with the right organization) while the other there is no solution in sight, that works at global scale. Most communities keep their feeling by remaining smaller (like HN) and strict moderation, both of which goes against what Reddit is aiming for.
All these news discussion sites (Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, HN, hell even 4chan) started out very good when the communities were small and then they grew to massive size and lost their personalities, got more generalized, were gamed more frequently, succumbed to group think, and had a bazillion other problems related to their popularity and size.
Reddit can somewhat mitigate this with subreddits and MeFi can slow the process by charging a fee. Perhaps their downfall is still inevitable.
His comments about reddit's recent mood swings, however, don't mean much. That type of thing has been happening every few weeks for a couple years now. The reddit community is always in a huff about something.
Maybe this idea (Google circles for news aggregators?) will help. Or maybe we should just abandon this discussion model all together.
Which is why reddit's use of user created and managed sub-communities (ie, subreddits) is such a brilliant way to pre-emptively deal with this before it happens.
Reddit is certainly a model of what a web community could look like.
MetaFilter has taken a different approach. The market is telling its team that approach is not economical. Perhaps there's some ideas they can borrow from sites like Reddit that baked more crowd-power and automation into their models from the get-go.
Ok I’ll bite. How would you fix Reddit? I have been using online forums for the past 20+ years and I know what you mean about communities like Reddit going from nerd heavy topics to primarily being the free advertising platform for onlyfans accounts and political hacks. But how would Reddit at this point stuff the genie back into the bottle?
For that matter, if you don’t believe in Reddit’s long term success, there are both investment opportunities and opportunities to build something better.
It doesn't work out for everybody. Lots of high quality communities outside of reddit have been invaded by people looking for an alternative and as a result they are now fighting massive traffic spikes, spam or the general reddit hive-mind taking over their discussion.
The problem is that many people have come to think of reddit as a public utility.
People expect a public utility to, perhaps, not be that innovative and maybe a little poorly run at times. What they do expect from a public utility is long-term reliability. They expect it to be there, doing what it does now, five or ten years from now. For some people (e.g. the blind), all of reddit is going dark on July 1st.
Reddit is not a public utility. It's owners have decided that short-term profits are more important than serving as a long-term non-profit public utility. I can't fault any business person for making this decision, but it's the key reason why we need publicly controlled infrastructure to do what reddit does now.
Reddit is many beneficial things. Just for one example, it's a new foundation of journalism. How many professional journalists rely on reddit to find and research news stories? If you read your local city's sub and then read your local newspaper the following day, there will be a surprising amount of repeated material.
Governments in many countries run public broadcasting corporations, public news programs, and even subsidize privately owned news companies, although in many cases that's mere corporate welfare. They do this because they realize that journalism is a cornerstone of free society.
The functions that reddit now performs are too important to leave in the hands of short-sighted corporate executives who have absolutely zero interest in anything beyond their next quarterly report and the bonuses tied to it. We must not jump from reddit into the hands of yet another corporation or this will simply happen again.
Public funding has produced things like lemmy.ml, but such projects aren't ready to scale nor, arguably, interested in doing so. This is something the UN should tackle to prove they still have relevance in the modern world. Instead of simply issuing non-binding warning after warning, perhaps it's time for international organizations to build the kind of public infrastructure that provides a benefit to all of humanity.
Hm.
reply