Digg vs Reddit also comes to mind.

https://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/d78wi/digg_loses_...

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2005-01-01%202...

https://mashable.com/archive/reddit-digg-traffic

DIGG blew its userbase by fucking up the UX.

Reddit is on path to do same. If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen.

-

But seriously, a designer should be thinking about the consumption/participation model as opposed to just the eyeballs/adwords-please-kill-me-now model...

The consumption and participation of a site is direct to the UX - and when DIGG basically made it a 100% consumption push, while also making participation weird/hard/less-desirable, that shit was dead.

Reddit is becoming a weird corporate bot colony and they are actively killing their UX.

> Reddit is on path to do same. If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen.

I use Reddit exclusively in the "old" mode, but I wonder how impactful would this be. The Reddit redesign was basically done to cater to a wider audience (9gag, TikTok, etc). I feel that either at this point or in the near future the number of people that use old.reddit.com exclusively will be a small percentage of the whole lot of people using the new design. Particularly because Reddit is "strangling" out users of old.reddit by leaving them out of the new features (I normally see comments with stuff like :4222: which I assume are emoticons only available in the new reddit).

> I normally see comments with stuff like :4222: which I assume are emoticons only available in the new reddit

For what it's worth, someone posted this Tampermonkey script that converts those codes to the proper custom Emoji's, on Old Reddit. It works well with Firefox at least:

https://justpaste.it/6624t

I've posted a lot about this in the past, and one of the things about 'old./r/' that is overlooked by the massive mobile consumers, is that information density is super high with old.reddit and RES.

I posted a bunch of tips on how to set them up for speed - Like I said, as a daily redditor for 15 years, uhm I have the 1,000 Karma Stare.

IIRC, Old Reddit addicts are a disproportionate influence among the moderation and high-karma populations. New Reddit is for the read-only proles, Old Reddit is for the people who provide value.

>I normally see comments with stuff like :4222: which I assume are emoticons only available in the new reddit

You're not missing much

> If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen.

You overestimate. Most people have moved on, and reddit gains new users every day who have no idea what old.reddit is.

moved on to what?

To using reddit as reddit intends, either the default interface on the web (so not old.reddit), or even more likely the first-party apps on iOS and Android.

I have to imagine most users are mobile or it's actively trending in that direction

it's becoming tiktok slowly

This is one of those things where the distinction between "UI" and "UX" really matters. reddit is fucking up the UI, but the content is still reddit. digg fundamentally changed the content they displayed from community driven to publisher and power-user driven. they could have survived a redesign if they hadn't also pivoted the whole product direction at the same time.

IIRC, ads and paid posts caused Digg to lose over Reddit. I didn’t use either at the time, but people I know did.

Yes. This is exactly what happened.

DIGG basically became what new Reddit looks like now, but they were specifically transparent that every post was essentially a paid marketing blob and the corporate commercial took over all of DIGG - pissed everyone off and they all flocked to Reddit.

Reddit is doing the same thing, however, when DIGG messed around with the UX, bots were not a thing in the same form they are now…

“Video killed the radio star” but now it’s

“Bot killed any sense of trust on social media”

As someone who only occasionally visits reddit, can I ask what the bots are doing? I’ve only ever seen bots that do things like correct spelling

> If reddit ever kills old.reddit, exodus will happen.

Plausible, but if it really does happen it will be a landmark. Modern losing against old and ~crippled UX.

It is still so friggin' weird to me that Reddit had the longevity over Digg.

Zulip didn't just "copy [Slack] exactly". The UX is much better than Slack, in my opinion. It's faster, and it puts the conversations center stage. With Slack I always felt that I had too click too much to get to a certain thread, and then it only used < 50% of my screen to show the conversation.

Zulip > Slack, even without this new change that Slack is dumping on users.

> "I wonder how often people succeed with these sorts of business models, which seem to be summarizable as "copy something extremely successful exactly, wait for them to fuck up sufficiently badly, and make sure migrating is really easy."

It definitely happens: another example that seems fitting was with LastPass. A lot of users (at least a few I know personally) migrated to Bitwarden after they changed its free plan, and many other long-time premium users also switched services due to bugs. Switching between password managers is a lot easier than one might expect (due to standardized database formats).

I'm not sure if many companies follow this plan intentionally, as it's not a given that the market leader(s) will eventually fail, but companies certainly benefit when former market leaders slip up.

To a degree, our current company exists because Yoast SEO made enough bad decisions that people switched to our WordPress SEO plugin. My friend wrote it only because he disliked Yoast and as every programer, he thought "I can code this in a weekend and it will work better". It was never ment to become a project.

Anyway Yoast eventually made a big enough mistake and 5 years later my programmer friend is working on this full time. I am the only other guy working with him.

Transport of data was at that time trivial.

That casts Google shutting down dozens of products in a different light!

Slack has actually caused this same situation before. Tuple benefited when Slack shut down ScreenHero.

https://medium.com/codingzeal/tuple-the-new-hero-of-pair-pro...

Is it? The only customers who would would put pain to migrate are the customers who would never pay. If I were Zulip and I didn't aimed to run just on VC's money, I wouldn't prefer hoard of people who I know for almost certainty that they won't pay.