> The days of ... Digg losing to Reddit are over.

I disagree. Especially somewhere like reddit where the power lies in a relatively small pool of moderators (ie. a couple of hundred people), who aren't well controlled by Reddit the company.

These moderators could, if they organised together, kill the site in a matter of days.

And I'm sure reddit-clones have been approaching the moderators with lucrative offers to do just that...

Surely, Reddit would just remove and replace these moderators at the first taste of real pain. Yes?

I don't think they'd have enough replacements ready quick enough. They'd have to decide between an influx of spam from having no moderation and upset users, massive disruption from upset disruptive moderators, or stale content by freezing all submissions to the site.

If I were in their position, I would have trained for this scenario, and already prepared a way to put entire subreddits into 'read only' mode which just replays history - ie. show funny cat pictures from last year. Then any subreddit that starts talking too much about leaving for a new platform gets put in read only mode. Let people think they are still interacting - ie. people can still upvote/downvote/comment, but it's mostly/all dummy stuff.

But... I bet they haven't prepared, and will be caught off guard.

>I don't think they'd have enough replacements ready quick enough.

There is never a shortage of losers desperate for a crumb of power.

Sure, there would be no shortage of applicants, and they'd all largely fall foul of the Douglas Adams rule about those who seek power. But they need not just people who'd put their hand up and do the moderation, but wouldn't drive all the users away (whether immediately or long term), which would be the hard part.

The last time subreddits staged a coordinated strike like this, Reddit warned they would replace moderators next time. I wonder if they'll make good on their threat? I wish they would, the powermod situation on reddit is out of control. Part of the reason these coordinated strikes happen is because most top subreddits are ran by the same handful of people. It would do reddit some good to get variety among the moderators.

Removing some moderators would probably anger other moderators...

And those can be replaced with what has to be an infinite pool of people willing to volunteer as thought-police for a public company.

But will the users stay if they do that? I'm not convinced I would.

Users don't care about the moderators. Users care about the content.

Most people hate the mods. "Mods are gay" is a common refrain on reddit. The mods are the killjoys that removed your post that didn't conform to their hyper specific subreddit rules, or locked a fun post before you got there.

Mods aren't leaders, they're hall monitors.

I reckon most people wouldn't care, they aren't there for the mods. Others, although far fewer, would celebrate due to the power mod situation mentioned above. /r/all is just awful nowadays so it might be an improvement.

I can vouch that it is not infinite. You couldn't pay me to do that shitty job.

A lot of the depends on if you think the moderator role is truly impactful in a meritocratic way where better work is rewarded with higher quality communities and content V.S. a largely rote role which involves correctly implementing the community rule set.

If the former is true, the moderators aren't really "replaceable" in that way. You can fire them, but the output of your product will suffer as a result. In that interpretation the moderators are actually some of the most important customers of Reddit - they produce quality content in return for free hosting and occasional assistance.

If the latter is true then you can just fire them and it doesn't matter...but it kind of seems like no one believes that? If Reddit really thought they could fire them they probably would have just done it? I don't know what the truth is but I think the former interpretation dominates thinking.

“ If the former is true, the moderators aren't really "replaceable" in that way. You can fire them, but the output of your product will suffer as a result”

Sure - the cost would be higher, but is that cost actually higher than allowing insurgent moderators to retain control over very prominent subreddits and, presumably, shut them down? Doubtful. There’s no way Reddit would allow moderators to “take down” Reddit.

I mean, I think there have been plenty of examples of new moderation teams being able to kill popular subreddits. So I do think there's a good chance that the option is illusory. The subreddit will die if you piss off all of the moderators at the same time and it kind of doesn't matter if it's through a protest you won't listen to or by firing them.

Facebook, Instagram, etc. have shown that users are willing to put up with an absurd amount of bullshit and bad apps. While Reddit may lose the crowd who are aware of this whole issue, those users are likely the tip of an iceberg of "I just want to see ~~titties~~ kitties."

Reddit isn't a cozy corner of internet subculture anymore. It was instrumental in getting the orange buffoon elected, for crying out loud.

People use those things because of people they know in the real world, reddit isn't like that.

also I dare say it was more 4chan than reddit who got trump elected

Rubbish. It was Twitter.

cnn is probably the biggest factor

IMO the powermods are one of the main problems of reddit.

>These moderators could, if they organised together, kill the site in a matter of days.

That's not quite true. Reddit has the power in this relationship. See for example what happened when /r/NoahGetTheBoat tried to rebel

https://old.reddit.com/r/NoahGetTheBoat/comments/13c9fx4/rem...

>>

   For all those reporting this, it isn’t coming down. If it makes you uncomfortable and you’re in the US, this is part of US “gun culture.” Work to change it.

   Edit: Good lord people, yes I can see that the post was removed by Reddit. We can’t influence Reddit admin actions, but we’ve reached out for clarification on the removal.
   
   Edit2: Reddit has clarified the removal, and it will not be rescinded. Not much else to see here.

>And instead of replacing them with new single winners like Mastodon, I'm hopeful the new trend will be to spread our activity to multiple sites, and to be a bit less online in general.

I, too, want to be hopeful, but how do you think this can possibly happen?

Metcalfe's law is a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law?useskin=vecto...

TLDR: The more people share a method of communication, the more value that method of communication has. Social networks organically evolve towards monopolies.

I said this in a sibling comment but it felt responsive to yours, so you summarize, I think what we're finding out is a.) When the marginal cost of joining another network is 0, people will join "lower value" networks and b.) When you have enough people on the platform, the marginal value to the user of adding an additional user becomes negative - when you get to a certain scale, the new people joining are less likely to bring you additional conversation then additional trolling and harassment.

Anecdotally, HN is at a sweet spot for me. It's large enough that I'm just a person in the crowd (which I value), but it's small enough and the interaction is limited enough that I don't feel I'm likely to receive persistent, ongoing harassment. (I catch plenty of trolling, but it never feels personal really, I don't think they'll recognize me in the next thread we bump into each other.)

Specifically on Metcalfe's law, consider that just like with the internet, e-mail, the phone grid, and p2p protocols, it is possible to have a common network without centralized control.

Disagree. Generally it’s porn/restricted content as the driver. If Reddit to better monetize the Platform decides porn/certain popular conte t has no place. Another similar to Reddit platform will emerge to host this less than above board content. That will in turn drive other topic discourse and eventually the downfall of the old.

See Snapchat for sexting. Instagram for insta-thots (Facebook has parents these days on it), and YouTube which originally was used for hosting copyright infringement (still is).

I'm not sure those days ever existed. MySpace is still operating, after all. I think we may have overestimated the degree to which network effects lead to an exclusive or monopolistic structure - it turns out a lot of people are pretty willing to have multiple active social media accounts, and that there are disadvantages to very large networks (pushing people to spread out into a series of smaller ones). And then there's federated stuff like Discord and Mastodon, where you can use the same account to join many networks, decreasing the modest friction.

> I'm hopeful the new trend will be to spread our activity to multiple sites, and to be a bit less online in general.

I'm the last person who would have predicted what I'm about to suggest a year ago, but I think there's a reasonably high chance that generative AI may soon be fulfilling a lot of our web content style type of needs.

I've been spending most of my evenings getting more and more familiar with Stable Diffusion, and I have to say, once you start getting better at prompt engineering and customizing the pieces of the model you can create (or should I say "generate"?) some really amazing stuff.

For years (decades?) I've been looking for a content experience that brings me back to the early days of the web, when everything had potential and you didn't quite no what you'd find. Lots of junk, but just frequently enough something wonderful.

I feel the same way messing around with generative content. Lots of "neat, but meh", however sometimes you'll create something that just really captures what you were looking for. Many thinks are predictable, but just enough is surprising and novel. Additionally the space seems to be rapidly expanding with fresh ideas and content in a way similar to the early web.

It's also currently a bit tricky to get everything to work right, and requires some expensive equipment. But I've been more entertained by generative content in the last few months than I have by web content.

We need to go back to build open protocols. Protocols instead of programs. And then let Open Source and companies build the programs.

That was a fight we had "won" on the days of MP3 (very painful), SMTP, MKV, among others during the 80s and 90s. The fact that people are now more willing to go back to install "real software" (in the form of phone applications) instead of web apps is an opportunity.

'We' are building such a protocol with ActivityPub. What's wrong with it that you have ignored it?

Aaah!! I was just trying to remember the "facebook killer" . Diaspora!! IIRC ActivityPub is what c as me from its inception in 2010.

Nothing wrong with it. Good job what the team has been doing. Now we only need some entity to build the "killer" social network app using it.

Something like the Hotmail or (later) Gmail of SMTP.

I'll be waiting!

Here's an idea -- there is already a sizeable number of users that get to Reddit via third party apps. Would it be feasible for a would-be Reddit alternative to form by having all the third-party apps switch over to the new platform overnight (as soon as their API access to Reddit is cut off)? That would get you a large enough user base to bootstrap.

"Less Online" is exactly the silver lining I'm seeing from this new era of public facing websites slamming the doors shut, and treating sharecroppers ('creators' in the current lexicon) as inconveniences.

What killed Craigslist more, Facebook marketplace or the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act?

> Digg losing to Reddit are over

I strongly disagree and I can give you a clear reason why.

Internet forum / niche communities serve a few purposes, and the advent AI (I know, bear with me) destroys their existing moat.

A reddit serves the following purposes:

1. Persistent store of timeless information - ChatGPT style models have made this redundant. I

2. Updated store of current information - The problem with current information, is that it's generated where the users are. It is a chicken and egg problem, but that's exactly what makes it so dangerous. It takes 1 viral moment for people to pull off a critical mass of exodus, and you're never getting your users back. Like a siphon that will keep draining until your reservoir is fully empty.

3. fully realized niche hang-out spot - 20% of people create 80% of content. The 20% are embedded deeply enough in internet culture, that they can make a consensus move to another platform, and the other 80% will follow. (only applies to niche hobbies)

4. 9gag replacement - This is easy to disrupt and has been disrupted many times before. Reddit itself has already destroyed any sense of uniqueness that its platform had. No meme platform has managed to stay cool for more than 1 generational cycle. Reddit will be no different.

Previous reddit exoduses didn't work, because it involved banning a certain extremist/morally dubious communities. The alternatives were terrible, unmoderated and struggled to migrate the timeless information over. The next exodus will be normal users. Timeless information migration has already been completed by ChatGPT.

My favorite subreddit has already migrated to a 3rd party website. Moderation is a lot easier with LLMs. The last remaining piece of the puzzle is for a semi-competent new competitor to show up. Let's see if it actually happens.

> Persistent store of timeless information - ChatGPT style models have made this redundant.

This was only possible because ChatGPT-style models were trained on data scraped from Reddit using the (then) free API. While it may seem like bolting the barn door after the horse has run out, Reddit can ignore this and become obsoleted by models that keep ingesting the latest user comments, or at least earn some money out of it.

I welcome you to Subreply.

For Reddit there's http://communities.win. That's where all the subreddits that got cancelled went. Reddit refugees, used to a finally manicured echo chamber, will of course find it toxic. It doesn't suffer from the problem of Gab and Truth social in that there's enough fun stuff mixed in to make it funny and reasonably entertainin and not just excessively doomer politics.

Rumble seems to be doing pretty well too. Nothing can replace Reddit for the unbelievable variety and ontology of adult content though.