Unlike the Reddit vs Digg situation, there’s no mature product to mass migrate to. Digg collapsed because Reddit was an easy move over. There was already a polished alternative.

The Fediverse is great, and has a lot a of promise, but it’s not fully developed and easy to move to. Us migrants are building it out now.

Reddit will lose it’s soul. It’s been showing signs for ages anyways. Spez wants to create a doom-scroll “social network” that caters towards the TikTok and Facebook crowd. That kind of cancer has been creeping in for a while anyways.

The core of Reddit was always the discussion. The niche communities where you had real enthusiasts. You could get your retro gaming PC diagnosed. Trade parts for your imported Honda Beat. Ask questions about utility locating. That’s the heart and soul. And also the hardest thing to move.

Digg is just a newspaper now. Not a community aggregator. There’s no soul. It became a domain. You can’t Digg or bury. You can’t even comment anymore. That’s where they’d like to take Reddit. It doesn’t require effort or mods. Just a like button.

Even victims of previous mass exoduses are still around. Take a look at the state of digg or fark now…

Whatever happens won’t be over in a week, a month, or even a year really…

I’m really excited about Lemmy and the fediverse in general. I’ve grown tired of small “for the people” web services turning corporate and fucking us all by jamming ads into our face or delivering a bunch of bullshit content they want us to consume.

I went to the internet at an early age in part because I could find content that wasn’t littered with advertisements and all the other bullshit on TV. The fediverse seems like it can be a space more like the original internet, separated from the few big players (Meta, Twitter, Google, and I suppose Reddit now).

Reddit is dead, long live reddit? /s

People are right, Reddit will live on as a shell of its former self. In time, people will forget that this happened and the API change and loss of third party apps that didn’t want to pay those high fees will also be forgotten by those on Reddit.

Obligatory: https://imgur.com/a/GrPwnrX

Probably not, still too big to fail at this point, but hope CEO gets canned. Spez singlehandedly devaluated and depopulated Reddit while treating userbase as garbage. Fuck you Spez.

So… I have some harsh feelings about Reddit. It’s bittersweet. A reflection of humanity with both good and bad and corruption of power and so forth. Like many I spent a lot of time on there. Learned a lot; challenged my views; and threw my voice out into the void for whatever it’s worth. 10 years and a lot of server time given from gildings handed out and received. Oh well.

Whether Reddit persists is contingent namely on 2 things:

1) Will they revert some of the biggest grievances?

I find this to be highly unlikely. When Spez is quoting Elon Musk as doing good work at Twitter, you know that’s a bad sign. Spez was not the genius behind Reddit — Aaron Swartz was. Spez just wants to cash out and leave Reddit behind. They need to find a way to make an inherently unprofitable concept profitable — and so of course the users suffer. It’s little different to what happened to Digg, and what happened to Facebook when it navigated away from its original UI that was so elegant and simple. So I’m happy Reddit’s devaluation is continuing.

2) Is there a substitute to seize on this moment?

When Digg collapsed under similar circumstances, Reddit was already there. Of course Lemmy is here; Tildes is in progress; and now Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia is spinning up Truth Cafe (WT Social 2.0). All three have significant hurdles to overcome that don’t quite match Reddit 1:1… So we’ll see.

My estimation is that Reddit will “survive,” but with diminished value, reputation, and significantly-lower average monthly users no differently than how Digg has “survived.” My view is to not fix what isn’t broke — and to disrupt applications like Push Shift / RiF / Apollo and so forth that are cornerstones to Reddit’s success, along with a variety of other administrative choices — is shooting themselves in the foot. It’s the end of Reddit for me even as a lurker since I can’t use RiF anymore, and I’m excited for something new to take its place.

I’ll leave a Medium article I wrote going into detail further for those interested, along with a terrible experience with both Admin and Moderator incompetency and inconsistency.

It will survive, it always does, but it will lose a chunk of users.

Reddit went corporate a long time ago, and the only reason I ever went there was because I had RIF on my phone. Now I don’t, so I won’t, and I’m sure there are many like me.

But if they survived all their other controversies there isn’t any reason to think they won’t survive this one too.

Sad to say… Most people don’t care, they just consume.

Reddit will fizzle out very very slowly. A bunch content creators and mods that use 3rd party apps have left. What is left is the mass horde. It will survive on tiktoc and Twitter reposts for a long time. Like years… and eventually it will become stagnant and boring and the horde will find something new and disperse. It won’t even be clear that this is what caused it or if it is the normal tide of the internet. To stay relevant you need to have progress that keeps people’s attention. This move is a regression that will kill it in the long term.

It’s truly a mystery to me how the Reddit execs, investors, and board of directors think that these changes, and the way they’ve been rolled out, will be good for the long-term health and prosperity of the company. Even short term with an IPO on the horizon, none of this makes any sense. Maybe I just don’t understand the nuances of company valuations, IPO’s, executive pay, etc., but I don’t see how this move makes anything better for anyone involved. I could at least understand them shitting on the mods, communities, and apps if it meant a better payday for the investors and execs (it would be selfish and lousy, but at least I could understand it). I don’t understand the wisdom of this in the slightest.

Reddit will go the same way as Digg. The site will remain, but the lurkers will start to migrate once it becomes apparent that the 1% of us that create content have mostly left. Down the line in a few years, we’ll all be laughing at the pissbaby formerly known as Steve Huffman and say “Anyone remember THAT clusterfuck? Oh man, he really thought he had it made, talk about fucking yourself over!”

RIF made Reddit bearable to surf on a phone, without it, there’s just no point. RIP RIF, you were a fucking amazing app for the tiny investment it cost everyone!

Yes, it will survive. I still use it and will continue to use it because for me, Lemmy is not a fully replacement for many of the niche communities I follow.

They’ll survive but I don’t think they will be the powerhouse it used to be. They’re a link/meme aggregator with forum functionality. Memmy for me has already filled the void. I’ll pop back into Reddit sometimes the same way I pop into Digg.

I honestly doubt it’ll crash, I honestly doubt if most of us will even stick with lemmy

They want that TikTok brain type of experience. Scroll scroll, “damnthatsinteresting,” get mad about Elon Musk, ad, “aawww”, astroturfed pumping of upcoming movie or celebrity associated with a project, ad. They’ll get that, but it won’t be the same.