Reddit

I've stopped looking at reddit lately. I used it solid from the beggining, I was a Digg refugee. I even wrote some reddit bots to do various things over the years, so the value proposition of a site like reddit was not lost on me.

But I've been MIA for about six months now, and I've been pondering why I don't have much desire to visit the site all of the sudden, after ten years, and I think I've figured out why. In 2010 it was still small enough to be seen as sort of a community, the admins were relatable, sort of like saidit, but a lot bigger. Then reddit got very big, definately not a community anymore, and everyone hated the admins, but it had a new value, all of the groups of people you disagree with are also there, so reddit became like a microcosm of the Western world, with social fights taking place in subs like r/shitredditsays and r/subredditdrama.

I never visited subs like "fatpeoplehate" or "coontown", but they mere existence sort of gave reddit a relevance, because it provided a portal for normal people to see what the racists and the bigots were saying, and the media actually reported on some of what went on in those subreddits, such as the doxxing, and the fights they'd had with reddit's admins. The racists and the bigots were banned, and they'd come over to sites like saidit and say "reddit is going down!" and it seemed pretty laughable every time.

It turns out though, that as reddit has purged all the hate subs, the site is no longer a representation of the Western cross section like it once was. Now all it is is a collection of special interest forums, and the problem with that is that reddit's forum is no longer the only game in town. Cookie cutter php based forums have become very sophisticated in the past few years. Facebook groups are corralling people with shared interests, and in facebook's case you get to talk to real people, not just rando screen names with goofy flair all over the place. Unified "login with Google or Facebook" is also becoming more common, so that users don't have to start from scratch at every website, the internet is becoming one big user forum.

So, ironically I think the racists and the bigots were right about their removal being the beginning of the end of reddit. I don't know how reddit is doing traffic wise, but I don't see a path for the future. If I were a venture capitalist I'd have no interest in funding the site. The value, in hind sight, was not the platform, but rather because it allowed people to come face to face with the enemy, on neutral ground. Now they've scurried off to 8chan or wherever, a place most of us would not want to even visit for fear of being put on some watch list. Few people want to get into facebook fights, because there you have no anonymity to hide behind, you could get fired for being too honest.

Also, after reddit has purged the last of the big hate groups, T_D or whatever it might be, there won't be much reason to ever see reddit in the news, less mention in the news means less high profile AMA's, which means even less mention in the news, and so on until the grave has been dugg, if you will.

I'm glad the bigots were "deflatformed" in the short term, but in the long term, that might not have been so helpful, to have removed that line of communication between radicals and the rest of the world.

What I like about saidit.net, in the mean time, is that it's like very-old-reddit, still small enough to have a constructive conversation with people I don't agree with. If I were in charge of reddit, or saidit, I'd consider my competition all of those external PHP forums which are offering more and more usability all the time, and work to make subreddits more like proper forums, and less of a monolithic upvote/downvote battle between headlines and topics, but in the end they just won't have the development power to keep up with the rest of the Internet when it comes to catering to interest and hobby forums.