The difference was Reddit had already built up a reasonably comparable audience when Digg imploded so the migration was easy. If you look at a similar graph of Reddit today and Lemmy/Kbin, you probably wouldn’t even see these tools register with the active user base of Reddit so high. I think “rhyme” of history is that another service will eventually win, and it might be ours, but it’s more akin to the fall of the British Empire than an overnight event.
This is so true. Might catch heat for this, but I actually like TikTok and use the app most days. The last thing I want from a content aggregator is a reposting of the same things that are popular on another app. If I want to watch TikTok videos, I’ll open TikTok.
The irony of the situation is that it’s very popular on Reddit to hate TikTok, and yet TikTok videos are constantly getting upvoted to the front page. It’s almost as if most redditors actually do like TikTok videos, but they also like to constantly demonstrate how unique they are by making sure everyone knows how much they hate popular thing.
I really hope that Reddit is getting punished for being too greedy. But I’m afraid that it is too big too fail just like Twitter sadly. But I’m glad that I’ve found Lemmy.
Jury is still out on Twitter. It very well could fail.
It just didn’t happen the instant Musk entered the building. This type of thing usually happens on longer timeframes. Digg died unusually fast.
Digg failed fast due to people already using reddit. Many users had an account on each by the point of the big update. Enough were giving up on Digg for earlier changes.
Digg kept trying to find better ways to monetize, but eventually just gave up on keeping its own identity. By the time Digg released the big UI change, many users just stopped using Digg and used their reddit accounts. Many did have to create new accounts, but reddit was functionally better Digg by that point.
So what made Digg fail fast was due to it already being on the ledge. Digg chose to jump as opposed to get pushed off. Reddit didn’t have a strong alternative coming up like Digg had.
I guess I’m mostly rambling, but Digg was set up to fall already. It just decided to go for it. And reddit was so good for so long that alternatives never built up a users.
No that’s a very valid point!
In a way I’m glad this time around we’re building our OWN instead of jumping into another centralized platform. If it happens again, we can just shard off and host out own instance and still follow all our favorite communities etc …
@Paesan
Sorry for the dumb question… what’s the history that’s repeating?
I assume that he’s comparing the migration of Digg users to Reddit when Digg rolled out its very unpopular v4 interface to Reddit making the current changes to their policies today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_revolt#Digg_v4_revolt_and_migration_to_Reddit
In the past, Reddit has cited not wanting to be in Digg’s shoes as a reason for keeping around the old.reddit.com interface for users who did not like the new one, so not wanting to do a Digg v4 is a consideration that I believe has been on the minds of the company in past years.
Reddit is more popular now than Digg was back then.
The bad publicity hurts it a lot though. It’s not something tangible that people are going to see results in for a long, long time. It’s going to be more gradual than immediate.
Also Reddit will retain a huge majority of people, but the quality of it’s communities will decline over time. People will find less of a reason to go there, and companies paying for data scraping will pay less as it will become much less efficient to use it.
Think more like Facebook. Still a huge mega company that has a iron grip in the social media sphere… but largely only gets used by tech illiterate older people. It’s often quoted as the “place memes go to die” and “a place for grandma” or boomers in general. Reddit, and Twitter will essentially become similarly comparable.
Anyone saying otherwise, is goofy. Either trying to see an immediate result… or those trying to argue there will be no results.
Ironically “Kbin app” is a hot topic on Google trends, I think people want a mobile app