- cross-posted to:
- reddit@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- reddit@lemmy.ml
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.
I’m not convinced that this is going to be a Digg-style collapse, but I do think that there are legit points about Reddit attritting over time.
That being said, Reddit benefitted hugely from the Digg influx, and it left an impression on the community. Team Reddit clearly was concerned about doing a Digg over the years, and I’m pretty sure that that’s why old.reddit.com stayed around.
The parallels are kind of striking, though. I was on Reddit long before the Digg influx, and I remember all those new users feeling their way around, trying to figure stuff out. Using Digg terminology, mostly being angry with Kevin for the changes he was forcing on them. Reddit having load problems from the influx. I was explaining how Reddit worked to those Digg newcomers, the way the existing Fediverse people are now to me. It’s like that all over again, just now I’m looking at things from the side of the new arrivals.
As this article describes, even Digg’s collapse wasn’t actually the Digg-style collapse that we commonly imagine it was nowadays.
It’s interesting how human memory and historical records can distort things. I’ve been following the Ukraine war closely, for example, and there’s a lot of people who are thinking that Ukraine has failed because their current counteroffensive hasn’t achieved a rout in 2 weeks. Wars like these take years to unfold, and then we read about them in minutes on Wikipedia so people don’t get an intuitive sense of that.