Probably a lot of these posts coming, but here’s mine.
Just deleted and exported all of my Reddit comments/posts and exported them (hey, I’m old and can experience bouts of nostalgia.) If Reddit as a company cannot respect their users, then a user I will no longer be. Normally such things don’t bother me. For profit companies are always behave as scumbags. We’re their product and if the product doesn’t behave, then it gets put into its place. That is what I have been seeing the past couple of months.
What finally did it for me, to jump ship, as the way the Admins started treating the Mods. People that actually grew and put in the effort to grow the various subreddits. You know, the people that actually did the work to produce the product Reddit, as a company, is trying to sell. It is not surprising that Reddit’s management is so clueless. They want to make money, but the product they are trying to sell… Was built by someone else… FOR FREE. The Reddit execs think they have tons of content advertisers would love, when all they really have is a platform, which OTHER PEOPLE built content on. Advertisers don’t care about the platform, there are tons of those out there. The advertisers are only interested in the content that will draw people to look at their ads.
My prediction is that the Reddit IPO will be successful, but as a company it will outlast the IPO about 3 years.
Sometimes things are not about money and it astounds me the number of people that just don’t understand that fact.
I think it will be a long, long slow death. Digg is still out there doing something over a decade after it’s users exited en masse. I think Reddit as a store of useful human content, will just keep slipping and having more noise than useful signals. It’ll be a while, but at the same time it’s already dead. For me it was just so shocking for them to not realize what their actual value is. Pissing off the oil you are drilling, is not going to go well in the long run!
People have been talking about Digg in context to the last large exodus involving Reddit, but prior to all that conversation I’d never heard of it (joined Reddit a few years after that was history).
Just took a look at it, and… what am I looking at? It was supposed to be the predecessor to Reddit, but it looks like an early 2010s news site.
In that time period - 2008 to 2011 - if you’d told an internet person you’d never heard of digg, they’d look at you like you’d asked them what their favourite flavour of crayon was. It was the social news aggregator for normal people; all the appeal of news aggregators and comments sections, but without the nerdy belligerence of Slashdot, the lul-so-randum basement humour of Fark, or the primitive interface and sneering elitism of Reddit.
Just took a look at it, and… what am I looking at? It was supposed to be the predecessor to Reddit, but it looks like an early 2010s news site.
That’s the now digg, not the then digg.
Here’s an example of their frontpage when they were at their peak, in 2009. Then, for contrast, here is the redesigned frontpage that killed them, launched August 25, 2010. … Ok, only half joking - the bugs and errors were a problem - but this is a stable version of digg 4.0 - the controversial redesign that ‘killed’ the site, though half of the changes that drove off their userbase were related to the algorithm and how pages/posts/content was promoted. I never really used the site so I don’t remember exact details, but it did result in ‘poweruser’ problems with a few people dominating content, and users also complained that the 4.0 version of the site seemed to promote a lot of content they didn’t want while making it hard to access what they were interested in.
After it’s collapse the company’s assets were broken up and the domain/website/‘digg’ name were sold off as a package - it looks like the new owners have redesigned the site to look more like a news site and less like a news aggregator.
