I’ve been seeing a lot of angst and emotion on the Reddit migration, which results in either defeatism or blind optimism. In the end, it probably doesn’t matter, but I wanted to do more fact-based research into the subject.
I put my findings and my analysis into what it would actually take to kill Reddit, based on the deaths of Digg and MySpace. tl;dr it’s a lot less dramatic than most people would think.
What always helped centralized social was an environment of rapid growth. For the majority of people there wasn’t a “before” to compare to whatever they signed up to, so a play like the one Reddit made, which isn’t about the quality of the content but “whatever gets people in the door”, worked - focusing all your energy on hypergrowth was the Web 2.0 strategy. But my own “before” goes back to browsing Usenet over a dial-up shell account(terminal access only). The technology used then was primarily characterized by being efficient to store and process, which led to a federated model that shared text threads.
The reason people switched from Usenet to early web forums was also a combination of not having a “before”, plus some new conveniences. Usenet moderation tools were very limited, ensuring that spam and derangement were common. Because the design was made just for text, you didn’t have image-focused content, but you also didn’t experience the things images get moderated for now - you could post a UU-encoded file that contained an image, or a link to an image, but you couldn’t shove it in people’s face. And tree quoting replies was normalized, if rather disorganized - long-running threads often got “forked”.
The model of web forums that became most popular - flat topic threads, more images, centralized moderation - caused as many issues as it solved. Flat threading with no post ranking makes people reply “first” at the top of the thread, images create a whole attack surface, and centralized mods have more power to trip on. But they could provide a better experience along the narrow set of things they wanted the forum to be about, and that made all the difference. That’s how the centralized model works. When I think of places like Something Awful or Newgrounds in their original heyday - it’s really gatekeepy stuff. There were tastemakers and you followed their lead or else.
Reddit started with a lot of link aggregation, which was also Digg’s thing - that model “pushes” more content than a regular forum, so it helps build broad-audience engagement. But Reddit added more Usenet-like elements, and those gradually took over a lot of the niches as more people started using Reddit to ask questions and make statements addressing a specific community.
Something that I think defines the federated space is that there is less “push”. The power is more distributed, fewer gates to keep. Reddit represented those values for a while, and now it obviously doesn’t, so the users who were there for that are going to drift this way very quickly.
As someone who came from a similar background and started on BBSs and Usenet, this is a very insightful post that I hope people internalize. The “enshittification” of what came before was a process that took a long time in many cases and with less of a factor of a specific group of people pushing a culture or taste this experience has a chance to grow into something completely different.
Great comment. I agree with everything you said.
As you mentioned, every common type of community forum has it’s own “quirks” (I didn’t want to say pros and cons or something like that) which make it suitable for a certain type of interaction.
Some are better for very large discussions joined by thousands of people, others are good for small groups talking about very specialized topics. Every style naturally promotes one type of interaction over the others.
Which is why I really like the federation system.
It allows people to create very different interfaces with different strengths and user experiences which still can share content between each other, even if the features of one interface isn’t fully compatible with the content of another.
Overall, I feel like the experience on the fediverse, while familiar enough and easy to settle into, is very different than whatever systems everyone have been used to for decades. I think the reason for this is, as I said in the previous paragraph, that it gives developers a platform with already available content through other instances to test their interactive website ideas on, and provide the users with a whole lot of user experiences to choose from, while essentially keeping track of the same communities through it all.