this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2023
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Hello. While what Reddit is doing isn't great, it's the reality of running a site that's now owned by venture capital to make some kind of economic return for its owners. Running a site like that isn't free, and advertising dollars alone are probably not enough to generate the sort of return that its owners are looking for (or even pay for the its costs).
The core issue is twofold: Big Tech has devalued online services to the point where users are inured to not paying for them, and because of this inurement, most users are unwilling to pay for most online services if they don't seem to be offering a value add. Gaming services like Steam have managed to get their users to pay but that's because they are offering a service that's generally superior to piracy, such as immediate downloads, achievements, and other online services. But no one is ever going to pay to use a message board, and I doubt gimmicks like Reddit Gold bring in much money.
Perhaps the future is found in the past - people migrating back to self-hosted message boards - there used to be thousands of these back in the 1990s and 2000s. Some of them were run as small businesses, others were run as hobbyist projects by their owners. But I doubt there's going to be a mass exodus, and unfortunately, centralization has increasingly become the norm for the Internet.
I'm going to say that Big Tech hasn't devalued online services. They've always been devalued. In the days of BBSes, most had both paid and free options. The free users might get bumped when the board was busy but that was it. You were often still able to dial in at all times and do everything on the board.
Honestly, that concept just carried forward. Usenet access was simply part of your internet access payment to your ISP. Free to join. You just needed a free NTP app. Many web forums were the same - completely free to use and maybe there were some ads, donations, or whatnot to help fund the site. Some even used forums as loss leaders - Harmony Central had their main page along with forums. Ditto other sites like Something Awful and Bodybuilding.com.
Right now the short-term is a mix. The reality is that the major jumps have been to Discord, not other forums, or so it seems. Subreddits already have their own Discord servers in many cases and there's a load of them on top of that. Beyond that, it seems a mixed bag of people trying to find a new home. Talks have varied outside of the Lemmy / Tildes mentions; Fark, Hacker News, City-Data, and various smaller forums.
Seems we'll be split on to at least a few if not many disparate forums and sites to fill various needs.
Yeah. I imagine most people will continue to use Reddit. I know I plan to, but it's always good to explore alternatives.
As someone else said, Reddit will die a death of a thousand cuts. The big hits will be the 3rd party apps loss followed by the expected old.reddit.com loss. That said, the majority of users don't use either of those. I'm seeing some general large site / social media fatigue combined with a lot of mentions of Discord. Given they've even got forum channels now, it seems Discord may be one of a few new smaller web forum options like we had in the late early 2000s with the start of software like vBulletin and phpBB. It's not looking like the Digg to Reddit migration. It's more the Usenet to web forums migration. Reddit is the Usenet 2.0. We're now scattering and waiting for the Usenet 3.0 contenders before a new champion is crowned.