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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33035 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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I'm personally bearish on the possibility of either Reddit reconsidering their policy or a successful exodus to fairer lands.

I joined Reddit after the whole Digg affair, but I presume that it was nowhere near as entrenched as Reddit is today. Network effects are killer, as all the Twitter competitors found out to their chagrin.

Reddit really does have plenty of room for enshittification before it collapses, though it's trying it's hardest.

The social media landscape/ the internet as a whole is significantly more consolidated these days, I can count on the toes of an uncontrolled diabetic the number of communities that successfully spun off from Reddit (Drama, The Motte, Chapo?). It takes an unusually cohesive and dedicated userbase to pull off, the typical normie browsing sports subs is there pretty much entirely because it's the most popular venue, and they're unlikely to abandon ship till it reaches critical mass.

At any rate, I'm grateful that the Motte made it through mostly unscathed in its own transition, and I wonder if we were ever big enough for others to take note.

Reddit has no network effects. A community is community. The communities that are dedicated to sourdough pizza can thrive separately from the rough anal ones. So they can jump. It probably leaves the subscribers on /r/brutalanalwhileeatingpizza in a cold place. But there will probably be only a 100 of them.

Why do you think reddit killed off all the old forums, then?

For me the upvote/downvote mechanism did a lot better job of surfacing the most interesting things to read (posts and comments) that previous systems like Slashdot's moderation system.

I think it was just the convenience of being able to browse many forums on one site and join them with one click, instead of the tedious process of registering a name and password, and responding to a confirmation email, separately for every forum. At least that's what it was for me.

Right, that's just a network effect.

Depends which forums. I am still member of a couple which are as active and interesting as ever, although they have a fairly distinct profile. "Normie" forums probably died thanks to reddit.

?

I can clearly see network effects. Reddit is an agglomeration of communities on one convenient platform, I don't think the number of people laser focused on any one single sub or community is significant. Most people browse a diverse arrangement of subs, such that leaving Reddit as a whole for the sake of any single one would be a massive pain.

While I'm alright with The Motte being it's own thing, it itself lost a small amount of value and Reddit more when the two divorced, due to friction and loss of users.

People want switching between communities to be as easy as clicking on a drop down list, not the balkanization into forums that once was the norm.

Reddit is far from being in danger, but I think this move could be the start of a death spiral. The only reason people tolerate that this company essentially monopolized internet forums is the UX and tooling that's accrued over the years and network effects.

Remove the former and you're left with an extremely shitty website and app that only has "people use it" going for it.

And that's a premium target for competition. Especially for something as simple as a text forum where setting a competitor is extremely easy (compared to say, video hosting).

The network effects are bigger than Digg's ever were, but if that's all you have going for you you're a dead man waking. Someone will Facebook you eventually.

Drama, The Motte, Chapo?

TheDonald and, sigh, watchpeopledie.

Also: gendercritical -> Ovarit, ConsumeProduct under the auspices of the .win network, OpieAndAnthony -> onaforums. Probably others, too.

There’s a meme that successful break-off communities are impossible, but it’s hopelessly out of date. General-purpose break-offs fail, but if people are in a habit of visiting specifically the community instead of just seeing it pop up occasionally on their front page, they will follow it to a new location. Honestly, fully unsuccessful community break-offs are rarer than successful ones at this point. The reddit diaspora is large and growing.

TheDonald and, sigh, watchpeopledie.

Also: gendercritical -> Ovarit, ConsumeProduct under the auspices of the .win network

Took a look at all of these. They look to be pale shadows of their former lives as subreddits. The Motte has taken a hit but at least still gets comparable weekly comment numbers to a year ago. I don't think you can cite any of these other four as success stories.

The Motte's peak was a lot lower than Donald/WatchPeopleDie, though

I doubt starting a general discussion community ever works. It seems to me that basically all the ones that exist started out as a discussion community for some specific thing, which then starts its own general channel for people into thing X to talk about anything.

C*mtown too, for some definition of successful. There’s actually more than I thought, looking at this small list here.

WhereAreAllTheGoodMen.

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