I think Reddit is headed down the same path as Twitter, it's not going to die, but it will be less popular and less relevant. The most popular subreddits appeal to a broad/general audience that doesn't care much about API access or moderation tools. That is, the average user who is there just for the memes and doom scrolling the latest news. It's these popular subreddits that will continue to drive traffic, serve ad impressions, and keep the site alive for the foreseeable future. It's the niche special interest subreddits that are going to suffer the greatest.
Jellyfin recently launched their own forum a week ago in response to the Reddit turmoil. I expect to see this happening more, as distrust in the major platforms grows, people will begin moving to self-hosted solutions so that they're in control, no longer at the mercy of a for-profit organization whose only interest is monetizing their content. https://forum.jellyfin.org/
I think federated platforms will also have their place, fill some niche, but will never completely replace the major social platforms.
> the average user who is there just for the memes and doom scrolling the latest news.
Most platforms are only still alive because of the doomscrollers. They contribute a large chunk towards the DAUs (Daily active users). Ragebait and infinite scrolling just to get eyeballs on ADs is a terrible business model though. There has to be some other model that brings in revenue. Mastodon is coasting along nicely on donations and pocket money, but, still it has its issues.
I'm still unhappy about them removing NSFW from r/all.
Back in the day I could keep scrolling until my feed was majority dongs, and that would be the end of Reddit for the day. No regrets about signing off. It was like a perfect equal and opposite force to balance my addiction.
Perhaps we need an alternative to “died”. Digg is still alive. The Yellow Pages is still a profitable business. And yet their cultural impact has been nullified.
Digg isn't really "still alive". That's like saying Michael Jordan is still alive because there's a guy named Michael Jordan. The current iteration of Digg (which is great, btw) has nothing in common with the original other than the domain name.
It would, however, be extremely funny if they took advantage of Reddit’s current travails, dug out the Digg v3 code (not sure if the same entity that owns Digg.com actually owns it) and rose from the ashes.
Or more realistically, just stood up a Lenny instance.
I haven't looked at Digg in a long time. Looking at it now, wow it's terrible, nothing but SEO/clickbait/sponsored trash. I'm comfortable with saying Digg is dead.
Since when is Twitter dying? I hear people say they have stopped using it since Elon bought it, but I feel like that’s the case of the loud minority changing the perception of Twitter. I still use it every day and it seems to have a vibrant user base.
I for one can't wait until the extremist zealot power users leave so normal people can have conversations on Reddit but so far it certainly hasn't happened.
> How much of the previous disruptions came with actual improvements to the user experience? Or at least something novel?
There was a major "conscious shift" of society to get everyone on the social media boat with a lot of promise and it changed everything. Now we're all on the boat and our lives have not gotten magically better. The new hope is split up two different ways
1. New technologies really do have something magic that will let us have our cake and eat it too -- the benefits of a centralized medium without centralized control
2. "new" technologies are really just a sneaky way of fragmenting the larger system and moving back to something smaller and simpler.
My theory is, on the whole, that we're afraid to admit that we're sick of the big centralized networks and need to dress up that fact by pretending that the real feature of new networks is actually something technical.
edit: See also Bitcoin
Last chance to evacuate Reddit before it is recycled.
Both reddit and twitter have been extremely unprofitable for a long time. The only reason they were allowed to run for so long without making a profit is because investors were willing to bleed money in the hopes that they would be able to make money eventually.
When websites got killed by bad monetization ideas replacements were again available only because of those investors (like the digg->reddit migration).
Overall it's going to be harder for new ones to pop up, and if they are they're going to have those same monetiation schemes.
> How much of the previous disruptions came with actual improvements to the user experience? Or at least something novel?
I think that's one of my biggest critiques with the commonly suggest Reddit alternatives. They seem to not be offering much innovation in the space.
I've been working on a platform that's sort of like a Reddit/Discord/Patreon hybrid that combines the feature set of Discord with the discovery and threaded style of discussion of Reddit with the monetization ability of Patreon.
In the end, the people that drink the Kool-Aid offered by the platform will stay, and the wise people migrate to better platforms. The mega platforms like FB are cults with the main userbase being stalwarts that won't leave.
I think changing algorithmic/ad-ridden feeds to chronological or user-controlled feeds is a big enough change to stand in its own in many cases. The community culture can also be a big change. Even if current sites have nailed most of the UX aspects, they are so big and eager to monetize that they almost can’t achieve good outcomes in this area by their very nature.
Another thing I expect to induce significant change is the increasing familiarity with the digital world and growing technical competency among users. We’ve seen a huge shift in the past decade of increasing social media usage amongst boomers and such with low technical competency. People who grow up in the digital world, and people who work with technology enough to understand how it works (which the internet used to self select for, then it didn’t, but as an absolute share of society it’s an ever-growing pie) have stronger opinions on how sites should work and are more willing to use nonstandard solutions like federated clients.
Facebook died not because of its UX but because its community went to shit, it was no longer the cool place to be. IMO, Twitter and Reddit (which was never cool, but was interesting, but not much anymore) have suffered the same. They may never “die” but in a way that makes them already dead.
Tiktok, reddit, twitch? (de facto a social media platform) Yes, of course: just look at their disastrous policies, especially the ones lately implemented.(In the case of the first 2, imo their entire design is somewhat made to implode sooner or later)
As for Twitter? Not really. It might go the facebook route of slowly stagnating and becoming used by "platform loyalists" or something, but from what i've seen this is not the case. A lot of the usage is lower on Twitter because Tiktok exists.[The obvious reasons: zoomers, low attention span, video preference, etc] And let's be honest: decentralized/federated platforms are nowhere near ready for usage by the masses, from a technical POV.
Funnily enough if you were to ask me pre-2022 or even pre-2020 which platform will die first: i would have said Twitter, but Elon, like it or not, somehow salvaged it(for the moment at least). Reddit is probably the first to die[their platform design really isn't unique, essentially], Tiktok in the next 3 years tops: whether organically or not[it's really irrelevant, because even most of their "organic" traffic is arguably mostly inorganic due to their own immoral practices). Obviously i ignored dinosaurs in agony like Facebook and Instagram: they're just big and decay slowly.
The resilient services are those that occupy a non-gimmicky niche. I’ll explain the difference between a real niche and a contrived or gimmicky one.
For example, YouTube is the video site. That’s its niche.
TikTok occupies a more gimmicky niche; short-form videos with a gazillion little features to make it more fun. People may (will) eventually get tired of it. The funny thing is they may move to a service with a very similar offering but with a different style and gimmicks.
The ones that don’t fill a niche at all are also less resilient following this thinking, though other factors like being utterly entrenched (facebook) may keep them around a long time.
Another site that fills a real niche well is Instagram. It’s the pictures site. It’s nice to just scroll and see pictures, though they’ve diversified with reels and video content (which may actually be a bad idea in the long run).
Another classic example of a gimmicky niche service was Vine, though I preferred that to TikTok (which I don’t use aside from having played with it for a week).
I’m not saying that non-niche services can’t last, but niche services definitely have inherent advantage for longevity because they fill a simple need and it’s hard or not constructive even for challengers to differentiate.
Short form videos I think are here to stay - they really are sort of in between a pictures site and a long form video site like youtube or a streaming service like Netflix.
That’s a good point. Perhaps the image and video sites will eventually blend into hosting both — and short form video as well naturally. YouTube and Instagram both have short form video features and my youtube feed already has images amongst other things like polls.
My take on it is (1) this phenomenon is worse than people think, and (2) Facebook so far has been able to keep ahead of it. That is, Facebook has been quick to buy out competitors like WhatsApp and Instagram. Also around the time that Facebook built an advertising business, funding fell away for social media startups because it was generally believed that Facebook's moat couldn't be defeated.
> I have a TikTok account but don’t interact with anyone; I just consume content. This is like YouTube where I just consume content too. Whereas on Twitter, Reddit, Discord, and Mastodon, I do interact with people, comment and reply, et al.
I use TikTok a lot but not just for watching things. I write comments, I make videos, and I send DMs to other people on TikTok.
Conversely back when I was using Facebook, I was wasting a lot of time scrolling Facebook but I am not sure I was really being social on Facebook either.
This is also why everything on the Internet is NOT forever. Eventually the data that you post on that one site will disappear, get absorbed into some data lake when the company goes under, and eventually get out of date and become irrelevant as it will be unusable for targeting - your ad profile will change with age.
This is par for the course for any company, especially an internet-based company. I mean, all of the sites that were popular in the early 2000's are essentially dead now. The same will happen with all of the sites that are popular now.
Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc, all survived so long because of how dirt cheap money was in 2010-2021. Now, these sites that prioritized growth above profit are having to do an about face and prioritize profit. More aggressive ad tracking, once exclusive features being available for anyone to buy, once standard features locked behind a paywall.
Web 1.0 "failed" because businesses couldn't make money on the internet. So the companies locked down their ecosystems and brought us to web 2.0. Which is now failing because they still couldn't find out how to make enough money on the internet.
Web 3.0 isn't looking so positive either. Crypto is a verified dud to the average user. Decentralization has some good ideas and I'd be happy to see how that grows, but that still begs the question of how do you make money? Individually ran servers can be expensive, especially if that instance begins to see a lot of traffic. So either we do the same-old, same-old and try to push ads (which I doubt server owners would be happy with and would flee the platform), or put the entire front-end app accessing ActivityPub/etc. behind a paywall.
I really don't see a way that the internet will be able to continue on in it's current iteration with silo'd for-profit companies controlling 95% of the web. I truly believe we'll be moving into an age in the next decade or two of individual intranets. We'd all have our own little world of an internet where we can communicate and interact with our friends, family, individuals we invite into our server. Then access the wider web when necessary to connect with other companies/work servers/etc.
Exactly, web 1.0 succeeded because it originally was just regular people making their own pages and just having fun. It wasn't about making money, it was about connecting. You're right, the push to monetize the web was the downfall of web 1.0 and probably the web in general.
Jellyfin recently launched their own forum a week ago in response to the Reddit turmoil. I expect to see this happening more, as distrust in the major platforms grows, people will begin moving to self-hosted solutions so that they're in control, no longer at the mercy of a for-profit organization whose only interest is monetizing their content. https://forum.jellyfin.org/
I think federated platforms will also have their place, fill some niche, but will never completely replace the major social platforms.