Killing a giant (Reddit)
Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 91 points – faceted.social
I've been seeing a lot of angst and emotion on the Reddit migration, which results in either defeatism or blind optimism. In the end, it probably doesn't matter, but I wanted to do more fact-based research into the subject.
I put my findings and my analysis into what it would actually take to kill Reddit, based on the deaths of Digg and MySpace. tl;dr it's a lot less dramatic than most people would think.
You are viewing a single comment
Yup. Agree with everything OP said. Been saying it since last week. The 48-hour blackout wasn't going to kill Reddit. Hell, if all 8,000 subreddits had gone with indefinite blackouts, it likely wouldn't have killed Reddit either. The fallout from Reddit's decisions, and their response to the community, is going to take months, and probably even years, to really be visible.
I've been on Reddit for more than 10 years. I started using Reddit regularly after Digg went to shit. I've seen the drama, controversies, and protests that previously have taken place on Reddit. But what's been going on the last couple of weeks, I haven't seen before. As I mentioned in another comment, this is the first time I've seen a concerted effort to find alternatives, not just for a few undesirables (i.e. Voat), but for the community as a whole.
Yeah, the communities here are not going to be nearly as active as they were on Reddit, but people want communities, and just having a friendly place to gather will be enough to slowly attract others.
People's idea of what a dead social media site looks like is very different from what they actually look like.
People think "immediate implosion and disappearing from the face of the internet", but social media sites die long before the last post is posted.
Forums with dozens of users used to die over months. Big social sites take years, and they die not by going dark or quiet, but by becoming generic and boring or filled with Nazis. Either way, they shift from being "sticky" to being easily skipped over.
* MySpace has entered the chat*
Which it can do because it still exists. And shit, it was taken over at one point by Nazi enabler Rupert Murdoch.