Ever since the Reddit API revolt began, I've been hearing about its similarities with Digg's downfall. So I looked it up online, and it really has some crucial similarities.
Digg failed because of poor product decisions, rising competition from other platforms, internal problems amongst its staff, and users trying to game the system for their own gain.
The similarities are amazing, especially considering Reddit was one of the succesors of Digg. They can now enable other successors by making stupid decissions and alienating core users.
I wonder if this speaks to the unsustainability of platforms like these, or the cycle can be broken by making good decissions.
"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it"
Having been there, the part that i'm not seeing much on is the all-out warfare.
Near the end everyone got so goddamn fed up, that we just downvoted everything that wasn't a direct rebuke of the god-awful redesign (and upvoted some of the most rancid shit you ever did see).
People were stalking the new queues and just nuking everything from orbit.
Got so bad that they had to actively pull in RSS feeds (with downvote special exemptions) just to have something, ANYTHING that wasn't "FUCK THIS SHIT" or a goatse man, so people just went into the comments to do battle.
Won't reach that "burn everything" stage just yet, but by golly are they trying...
I'm not seeing organization by the users in this case to do something like that, though it would be warranted and I'd personally take part in it, given that all the content in Reddit belongs to the users, and the users should have a say
I made some comments over the weekend about moving to kbin.social and the comments were removed. I feel like those of us already over here got out on one of the first escape pods; and now that we’re safe on the new planet, we can likely use some of that excess fuel to bring more refugees in. There’s just a risk of having your comment going to the store to buy a gallon of milk and buy a pack of smokes, or who knows, maybe they’ll start deleting coyote accounts.