> I'm not so sure the network effect is significant to Reddit. Forum going is a solitary activity, not a social one. Reddit does not become less attractive if your friends don't use it. In fact, it would not become less attractive if there were no people and the site's characters were powered by sufficiently advanced LLM models or some such. Any reliance on other humans is merely an implementation detail, not the core offering.
What? No. This completely misses the point of highly specialised, high-quality subreddits like r/AskHistorians that would be worthless if there weren't actually other people on it.
If I wanted to talk to an LLM, I would do so directly, but most of the time I don't.
If Reddit silently replaced any outside human involvement with generative actors of sufficient quality and believability one day, how would you notice?
There is nothing about the service that indicates you are interacting with humans, aside from our knowledge of how it is likely implemented, and goes to lengths to hide that there are humans involved. That it is implemented using humans is just an implementation detail.
> I guess this is the same kind of question as "how do you know you don't live in the matrix?".
Not really. The canonical example of tech that does benefit from the network effect is the telephone. The more people on the telephone network, the more useful it becomes. A phone network that silently replaces each node with LLM agents would soon become apparent as when you catch up with the people you thought you were calling in the flesh, discrepancies will start to emerge.
But Reddit (and HN for that matter) tries to hide the existence of people. While I assume you are human, I don't really know. I don't know your name. I don't know what you look like. I don't know where you live. I know nothing. And, frankly, I don't need to because you are not part of the experience. That you are (probably) human is just an implementation detail. Whether you are human or an LLM is completely immaterial. What human participation there might be when using a forum is done so in solitude. It is not a social experience.
What? No. This completely misses the point of highly specialised, high-quality subreddits like r/AskHistorians that would be worthless if there weren't actually other people on it.
If I wanted to talk to an LLM, I would do so directly, but most of the time I don't.