Reddit is in danger of a death spiral

3 years ago by L4sBot to c/technology

Can Reddit survive as its volunteer workforce close down subreddits and walk away from the site in protest at the management's new policies?

corytheboyd 51 points 3 years ago

digg.com is still around, myspace.com is still around. reddit.com will also still be around in 10+ years. So what? We’re here now, and whatever’s left of Reddit will be over there.

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NumbersCanBeFun 11 points 3 years ago
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pseudorandom 5 points 3 years ago

I hit up Fark a few days into the exodus just to see if it was still an option. Yep. But also meh.

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MiddleWeigh 31 points 3 years ago

I think federation is the path forward. It's quite obvious to me. I'm not too too smart, but my gut is usually pretty accurate. Community funded, open source and decentralization is the only way we are gonna make it past the Fermi paradox imo, in all facets of life, including the internet, and especially social media.

The framework for the feddiverse is so organic that it just makes sense. It's good shit.

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cerevant 18 points 3 years ago

We've shown that it works for e-mail, it works for the web, it works for phones...

The age of monolithic web services is likely coming to an end, certainly for social media. The "free until we dominate the space, then enshitify" business model is proven not to work. Anyone who continues to invest in it is a fool.

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MiddleWeigh 12 points 3 years ago

I agree. People starting to realize if we work together we can have the things we want without a central figurehead. Social media especially cause it's literally just us.

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lynny 29 points 3 years ago

We can only hope.

I want Reddit to bugger off as much as the next person, but I don't think it's going to die. Even Tumblr didn't truly die.

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pacology 14 points 3 years ago

It will take Reddit a long time to die but it’s completely possible to piss off the minority that keeps it going which will result it to effectively die.

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ghostface 13 points 3 years ago

What do you consider dead? If relevant is the deciding factor then yeah, Tumblr, Digg, Yahoo are dead.

The key being how much of reddit functioned off of their invisible workforce? How much of their app will still use after api useful ness has dried out.

Give it till Nov

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backseat 21 points 3 years ago

Reddit's management seems to think that Reddit is too big to fail. They're wrong

That.

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SwingingKoala 14 points 3 years ago
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_Hyperion 11 points 3 years ago

Reddit will become pointless sooner or later but ipo will happen and Huffman will make his dough
Funny as 1700s fashion and john Oliver’s in the subs people need to gtfo asap if they don’t agree with what Reddit is becoming

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grue 4 points 3 years ago

but ipo will happen and Huffman will make his dough

What I don't understand is, what idiots are going to buy the shares with all this bad press? Isn't all this nonsense tanking the IPO value?

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XeroxCool 3 points 3 years ago

If it's important enough to talk about, it's big enough to throw money at. Or something.

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TheJesusFish 1 point 3 years ago

Retail investors.

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TragicNotCute 10 points 3 years ago

Great piece and a sneaky little beehaw link at the end. I would have rather seen it be a Lemmy.world link instead, but oh well.

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possiblylinux127 3 points 3 years ago

Lemmy world is HUGE

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NumbersCanBeFun 3 points 3 years ago
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s38b35M5 7 points 3 years ago

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said Reddit would start charging for using its application programming interface (API) because AI companies, such as Google and OpenAI, had been using the site's data to train their large language models...

This is so strange to me. Doesn't he know that they already scraped the site? That ship has sailed. They don't need to continually scrape reddit. You don't back an LLM with a live website, you use an offline repo of the data.

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Syanide 3 points 3 years ago

They keep scraping all new entries for up-to-date LLM's, it's on going battle who has best models.

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electriccars 3 points 3 years ago

I'm sure he's thinking it'll make a difference going forward because a LOT of data is generated every day with how many users there are.

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s38b35M5 3 points 3 years ago

You're probably right. Good comment.

I still think 17+yrs of internet bickering isn't too very different from 18 or 19. If I got 17 for free, do I feel the need to pay millions for each year in addition?

I feel like the way humans communicate is probably able to be gleaned by an LLM bot on even a single year of data.

I'm probably missing the big picture though. I seem to recall reading that with LLM's, the "L-er" the better.

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AlteredStateBlob 3 points 3 years ago

Even if they manage to field and pay for the manpower required to moderate these vast communities and hugely diverse communities, they won't make them feel anywhere near what they currently do - or rather did before all hell broke loose.

While many mods were power hungry babies, the healthy communities were greatly served by their mod teams in keeping the spirit of each individual sub alive and growing with it and their communities. Moderation from the top down will simply lead to sanitized, advertiser friendly hellscapes that are not places where communities can or will thrive.

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