Such a shame, I've used reddit for over a decade and enjoyed it for the most part. There's a lot of value in the communities and discussions on reddit, but I think the writings on the wall for this one. Hopefully someone can build something that captures the reddit experience and pulls in the communities
I've always thought Reddit as a community and platform was massively under-leveraged. So what other problems do Redditors have?
My Reddit experience these days seems to be nothing more than using RES to scroll through images. I miss the good old days of in-depth discussions that were across the site and not just pushed into subreddits.
We all know reddit has been on a slow decline for years now, and things are unlikely to improve as they head towards IPO.
Is there a good alternative yet for those of us who have little to no use for the viral front page content and whose primary use of reddit is interacting with niche communities, essentially using the site as a poor replacement for the dedicated forums from decades back?
Lemmy looked interesting last time I checked it out, but didn't quite seem to be taking off, an the dev team's censorship issues, even if they have been resolved, are troubling.
I hope we get a good alternative to Reddit. Their governance issues aside, their disdain for web and open systems have made me not use the platform anymore. It has been sad to see the platform become worse.
It's because the Reddit users that are actually bothered by this are unmonetizable and everyone knows it. nobody is eager to jump into that sink hole and Reddit itself is happy to be free of it.
A Reddit alternative is something every developer on here thinks they can crank out in a weekend and surely countless of them are actually trying that right now. But the reality is that reddit is a mess and nobody in their right mind wants to try to run a site like that.
It's probably just me, but does anyone else see this as a bit of overhype? I haven't heard too much chatter about reddit's /codebase/. I guess it's fine that it's going Open Source, but it's not something I have heard anyone really clamoring for, nor even really caring much about.
Am I being too shortsighted? What wonderful new things can be spawned from this?
It’s troubling that Reddit doesn’t really have a lot of competition, and the new user hostile UI on mobile shows their leadership knows it. I still remember when Digg made those big changes that caused a bunch of people to migrate over. But there isn’t a credible alternative to Reddit. It feels like most of them focus on anti-censorship or little moderation which means they get taken over by fringe groups.
We have old.reddit.com for now, but I feel like that’s just temporary sugar for the medicine to go down while people get used to getting pushed to the mobile app. If they took that away, and there’s really no guarantee it’ll always be there, I don’t know what else I’d use. There’s Discord but it’s such a different interaction model that it doesn’t feel like a valid alternative.
Reddit used to be really great for this type of community when subreddits could customize stuff and even have a dedicated Wiki. It's really gone the opposite direction in the last few years. They still can have these things but the tools are literally 10+ years behind.
I struggle to see any successful path for reddit that doesn’t devolve into being more like Facebook. Godspeed to the new CEO and I look forward to hearing their vision for the company.
I'm willing to donate to a site that offers the best parts of reddit with a fast, clean and usable interface. That might be lobste.rs in a few years.
Reddit was good for like 6-7 years (I was a member back when there was only one 'subreddit'). Turning point was the redesign into a web 3.0 mess that broke stuff like 'find in page' or the back button. Then the gradual monetization, app prompts and SEO that made the side less and less usable. I don't know if it was profitable, but there are definitely alternate paths they could have taken rather than completely gutting and selling out the site for maximum engagement and user figures.
Just what Reddit needs, an even better reason for bots and reposting. It will be interesting to watch this play out.
With all of the changes in the past year or two of the Reddit team trying to monetize it in any way they can I've noticed I find less and less interesting content.
I don’t think Reddit has the strong position it thinks it has. Ultimately, Reddit is a waste of time for many people. Sure, there are helpful aspects of the product, but ultimately engagement is mainly driven by smartphone addiction and peoples’ impulsive nature to consume content. The helpful aspects of Reddit are being increasingly served by Discord communities. If Reddit is going to be so user-hostile, why not switch to a more user-friendly platform? Is that not how Reddit gained popularity over Digg?
As a side note from someone who has developed nascent products: a user is a precious thing. Having even a single individual spend their time using your product should be considered an honor. Nothing good comes from disrespecting that.
reddit is almost entirely in existence due to its community/userbase. it's all it had when digg imploded, and it's pulled them through from dark to the traffic heights they are at now.
thing missing from reddit, despite the forum-like discussion thread part, is that it isn't social. it doesn't promote following users or anything of that nature or has little of those features (one thing that digg has/had)
thing is, currently, the way reddit is/is going -- there's not much that needs to be changed. it covers alot of use cases for alot of its userbase (i.e. I use it solely for submission and upvoting/link popularity tracking, and hardly for anything discussion/forum related)
I can understand that the community may not be as appealing due to its growing popularity, but what has Reddit done company-wise that conflicts with users' wishes? The interface is still as minimal and the advertising virtually non-existent
Reddit userbase is fast deteriorating. The power users who were responsible for much of its highest-quality content have been fleeing the sinking ship for quite some time - once a fully credible alternative springs up (and some are in the works already, with superior tech underlying them) they'll be as toast as Digg unless they radically course-correct.
I thought the same, but I guess in the end Reddit’s value is in its community and besides the lack of users, a new server like that would need to setup a new business model to sustain itself.
Besides, the third party app devs are often solo devs, right? I don’t think they have the skills, time and resources to do that in a coordinated way.
But I hope in the future something fills the void Reddit has just created.
I absolutely love your idea but I can't imagine Reddit would contribute to their own demise.
Granted, a lot of the decisions they're making over there lately would indicate otherwise, so maybe they'll love the idea.
Side note, anyone finding good alternatives? Obviously I love this forum as it does feel more like Old Reddit. But it's scratching a different itch for me. I've been experimenting with the Fediverse and it feels like it's one great app away from taking off. I'm very interested to see this Wikipedia-adjacent project that is supposed to come out and be the new Reddit.
I don't think Reddit will ever scale as well as something like Facebook . The bigger Reddit gets, the less usable it becomes due to subs becoming too crowded.
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