Reddit Is Already on the Rebound
Reddit Is Already on the Rebound
Despite mass protests by users and moderators, Reddit's unique communities look likely to survive the rebellion over the company's new business strategy.
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I think most people are willing to acknowledge that it will probably still be there in some way, shape or form. When people talk of online spaces "dying", they are not speaking of them disappearing. Merely losing the unique value they used to provide, and instead becoming something common and banal.
/b/ did die of cancer. But it's still there. Just ... go hang out for awhile and see how long it takes you to get bored. Used to have real variety on it, it truly was pretty damn random and creative, coined all sorts of internet terms we still use today. It no longer is, it barely coins anything now.
Reddit has moderation and the karma system, which dramatically increases its resilience. So a process that took months in one place might take a couple years there. But you can find news, memes, porn, cat pics and people bitching all over the internet. That wasn't what people went to reddit for, was it though? It was usually because they wanted the conversation found in the unique, smaller communities reddit provided, that no other online space really competed for.
Now there's a major competitor in the field. Us. While we're still inferior at the technical level, I think we're catching up very rapidly. They just can't compete with the velocity of our development, because y'know, they have to pay their people. Ours are pursuing it as a side hobby, passion project or an aspirational project, usually.
They'll be there. They'll probably become profitable. But their lock on the market is broken, and we're a lot cooler...
I mean ... do we even want everyone on here? I don't mind having a more accessible competitor. It's containment, basically. Gives the trolls a place to go where they can have some fun, so they pressure us less.
I made this point in another thread, but I don't think the person I was talking to understood me.
Its nice to have a lightning rod to attract the dumber parts of the internet. There's always room for fun, but when you start getting argumentative assholes who say shit like "bruh this app is trash" when referring to a website, you know the magic is dying or dead. Reddit's been that way for a while now. And their recent actions demonstrate that the audience they want is the ones who mindlessly scroll, the ones who barely contribute, the ones who can't tell the difference between a website and an "app."
Eternal September is a very real thing, and I think that there's a significant number of us out there who don't mind smaller, more meaningful conversations, at the expense of "popularity." I personally welcome a return to the "weird web," as opposed to the corporate bullshit we've been putting up with the last few years
+1 on remembering the smaller-scale "weird web," and being interested in going back. It's not possible to really go back, since some of the conditions that made a small, weird web possible (in particular, the impossibility of doing certain kinds of advertising and multimedia hosting) won't come back. But the emotional dynamics can probably be revived.
I don't know if I would go so far as to say that excluding undesirable people is desirable, or even necessary for the creation of satisfying communities. I remember there always being at least a few people in any forum that no one liked, and there were ways to work around that. IMO communities can repel a certain number of undesirables, even when they show up en masse. It's corporate interests that are difficult to repel from within a small community.