I’m way too young to remember Digg. I signed up for Reddit in 2015, and I’ve heard talks here and there about the migration from Digg, but that’s it.
Sort of. Digg’s implosion was much more immediate, the changes directly impacted normal users so it was easier to mobilise people, and at the time Reddit was a bit more mature and easier to understand than Lemmy/etc is now.
My guess is we’ll see much more of a Digg-like exodus once Apollo stops working and the average user sees an impact.
agreed. I’m still on reddit mostly for sports communities that I can’t replace here.
When boost stops working, I’m not going to download the Reddit app. I’ll keep using it on desktop, but it’ll obviously be less, but if they kill old.reddit that’ll be it for me.
I’m sure some people will just download the official app, but if there’s going to be a large drop in pageviews I would expect it to happen when the apps stop working.
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Digg tried to make money off it’s communities ASAP and killed it. Reddit tried the slow burn: build up users for 15 years and then pull the rug. It’s hard making money from a site that has all it’s users do the work. The only value reddit has is automated infra, which in the days of auto scaling k8s clusters is not that unique.
While infra is much easier now, there are still a number of rough edges that drive non-technical people to managed solutions. While great for getting things going the costs demand your product make a certain amount per month and per byte transferred and per CPU cycle spent processing that request.
With as many AI companies wanting training data the Reddit API is going to get hammered. Most of those companies will likely be unable to pay the fees so they’ll go elsewhere, hopefully to the fediverse. Also, given time we won’t need petabytes of training data. I expect this API money grab to be shortsighted both from the emigration we’re seeing now and tech improving.
I’d say we’re not at a Digg point just yet. The ingredients are there, but I feel the next big crisis, whatever it might be, might be the push over the cliff that does it. Hopefully kbin and the Fediverse get to a good point of maturity by then and can welcome the more casual redditors without a hitch.
Thing is, though, Reddit was offering Digg users something new in terms of user experience. I’m not sure federated content is that “it” factor for many.
Yes, although Reddit was more mature by then and had some communities already.
