There's More to the Reddit Meltdown Than Meets the Eye

Nothing against OP, but man, this is a rough one. This is nothing more than an opinion piece with bad takes.

What a bullshit article. I've highlighted some of it below:

Forums became uninteresting because I was looking for more structured forms of online publishing

Forums are pretty structured. Twitter and the new reddit are way less structured unless you're talking about structured with ads built in. That aside, that's a personal preference not a fact of the internet.

it’s just as uncool as Twitter’s Elon suddenly asking precious dollhairs for API access

if you use "dollhairs" in an actual publication you're going to find it hard to be taken seriously.

As a product owner, all you have to do is try them all, and make a list of all their features to know what Reddit misses. And can you really blame them doing just that, especially in a pre-IPO state? After all, investors will invest in Reddit, not 3rd-party apps piggybacking on its APIs.

They should have built out the feature set and had a good usable app before making the decision then. It was a dumb decision, full stop. Re-reading this it makes even less sense. Who is blaming them for researching 3rd party apps? And, OF COURSE, the investors are investing in reddit. That's why they should have a usable app of their OWN before dropping the ball like this.

While admittedly, good design alone doesn’t improve much the valuation of a product, good design can distract from bigger issues and helps prevent users from flocking to 3rd-party offerings

Good design absolutely adds to the valuation. Like, what? If an app performs as badly as the native app to the point people have no choice but to use 3rd party apps for basic things like, I don't know, MODERATION, you need a drastic overhaul before shutting out those 3rd party apps.

For starters, subreddits going dark — aka making everyone else’s content go private without their consent — could be considered content theft. Imagine, for instance, a Medium publication unpublishing all your articles because their owners suddenly disagree with Tony Stubblebine. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t land well. The same applies here. Many Reddit users find themselves having to side with either Reddit or some small 3rd-party app developer. Pragmatically speaking, a large majority of them will side with the platform owners because ultimately those apps are nothing without Reddit and its API. Going back to Medium as an example, when the Medium Partner Program was introduced, some big publications reacted very similarly, got angry, grabbed their toys and left trying to take with them all their writers. Except it didn’t work, because people ultimately wanted the platform and its reach, which was already proven, as is Reddit’s.

I stopped reading it here. They lost me at this point. The author of this is either playing to reddit's side, has no idea of what's driving the current situation, or a mix of the two. There's no way someone that actually wrote an article about this, and actually researched it, would come away with this take. Comparing a paid service, like Medium, deleting the articles and things you have paid to access is vastly different than shutting down an established forum(subreddit), that voted do so, that was free of charge the entire time. I know they have paid subscriptions and their dumb NFT stuff, gotta pay the bills somehow, but that was such a brain dead take I had to stop.

I haven't read many Medium articles but if they're all this low of effort I don't feel I've missed out on much.

edit:

Many Reddit users find themselves having to side with either Reddit or some small 3rd-party app developer. Pragmatically speaking, a large majority of them will side with the platform owners because ultimately those apps are nothing without Reddit and its API.

This part is the part that made me truly stop reading. I could imagine spez writing this himself.

Comparing a web forum to a medium article with people commenting under it. It looks like that person has little grasps on why Reddit or the likes are being used.

No one is using comments on sites like Medium to discuss anything. The comments there are always low quality from people that have no clue. You find that on Reddit as well. But the threading and voting systems kind of accounts for that.

These aggregators are a site to discuss what’s written on medium. They aren’t a replacement and vice versa.

Weird person that came to this conclusion. Imagine stop using forums. What would be lost. One person writing a medium article couldn’t replace that wealth of information.

Reddit is one of the most valuable websites on the entire internet. It's being miss-managed, and therefore it either needs new management or it needs to be replaced by something else.

The reddit community has tried to get new management put in place and seems to be failing, so plan B is to replace Reddit with something else.

I don't think just "getting rid" of reddit is an option at all. It needs to be replaced with something better. And that something is not Medium.

https://scribe.pussthecat.org/@attilavago/theres-more-to-the-reddit-meltdown-than-meets-the-eye-e42cedc6daca

Here, no paywall and no trackers.

It's not just about the information though, is it? Web forums can offer a sense of community that his preferred alternative (long-form Medium articles with comments) just can't match, in my experience.

Forums are the best thing about the internet. It's where like-minded people can talk without being interrupted by "suggested posts" and crap like that. Unless you're on Reddit.

Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one but they think each others stink.

To me half of the piece just sounds like him advertising for Medium. That was a huge turn off.

This guy likes to hear himself talk, which is what Medium is good for. Reddit is for hearing others try to tell you you're wrong.

What is so much better about forums compared to social media is forums are community and topic focused. Twitter and the rest are personality look at me focused. I much prefer forums then a bunch of arm waving attention seekers.

Simple logical fallacy. I'm not into forums so you should not be.

I can't have every conversation in my community and not all things I find interesting can exist outside of niche web communities.

Reddit provided easy access to many small areas all in one site with one general set of rules.

Hopefully lemmy will end up similar even without single organized owner.

Truly terrible.

Reddit is a problem because they shit on the community, not because blogspam is somehow a better format.

Anyone that says we’re “past” the days of forums, Reddit, Lemmy, etc. has an incredibly myopic view of what those really constitute.

It’s been mentioned the communities, but the problem solving and wealth of knowledge of those small, hyper-focused communities are unmatched.

Look no further than trying to find fixes through a web search, 90% of the crap you have to wade through is blogspam, which is mostly robot copy/pasted from other blogspam. The really helpful stuff is old forums and Reddit.

You can’t replace those specific questions and that specific knowledge with microblogs, blogs, or long form stuff like medium.

Its a very narrow view. And imho very wrong. There is no engagement on a blog post.

A forum or subreddit offers more than a blog post. I have friends still from the bbs days. Ive known 2 couples that met on reddit and are married. Cant do that with a blog post and comments

We are absolutely not over forums especially for niche communities. They're the best source of information on many topics

Forums are very useful for fostering discussion of gaining information. Especially in sectors like tech. As for other types of discussion, well…it can get toxic.

Forums may be in the "long tail" of the internet experience, I guess, but we are definitely not past them.

In case it's paywalled for others I'll quote the whole section:

The bigger question: should Reddit even exist?

So, in light of all of this, should Reddit even exist? Is there really a point to a web forum in 2023? Aren’t we past all that? I guess it depends on who you ask. I certainly am. The last forum I frequented was Macrumors’, and I left for two reasons.

• Forums are struggling with GDPR and my legal right to be forgotten. On the one hand, I understand that deleting parts of conversations when users want to leave, renders the threads quite unreadable. On the other hand, however, content is owned by the person who posted it (that’s true for Reddit as well, last time I checked), so I should have the right to leave a forum and take my content with me.

• I realised I was wasting time writing long, elaborate replies on technology threads instead of posting them here on Medium, as stories. Somehow, for me, a platform where people write articles then discuss in the comments, makes a lot more sense than what forums can offer. But I’m sure not everyone is like me, or thinks like me.

That doesn’t necessarily mean though that there isn’t still a genuine place for sites like Reddit in the modern world. Having online communities is certainly good, though we seem to be heading towards a monetised content model where even a tweet can generate pennies or dollars. On the one hand, I’m not against it when the content is good, on the other, it does beg the question, how are forums like Reddit supposed to stay alive in a world where advertisement isn’t necessarily a very lucrative model?

I guess I find myself less up in arms against Reddit and its potentially misguided attempt at getting a good IPO valuation, than most of its users and critics. Many of those throwing stones never owned or ran a company, and while Reddit’s CEO does come off as arrogant, it’s a trap easy to fall into when your site has a daily 52 million users. Many CEOs also tend to have a bit of a God complex. I guess it comes with the territory?

Steve Huffman does have a point, though. This will blow over one way or another. The question is, what’s left in its wake?

He does at least put the caveat of "it depends on who you ask" on it, but both of those bullet points he raises strike me as very ill-thought-out.

The first bit about GDPR and the "right to be forgotten" is kind of interesting in the wake of Reddit restoring deleted comments, but I'm not sure that this is actually a GDPR problem. As far as I'm aware the "right to be forgotten" means that the site has to delete anything it's stored that's personally identifying, but that doesn't necessarily mean it has to delete literally everything you've ever written. When someone deletes their account and you scrub their username off of the comments they left it seems to me that this would suffice (note: not a lawyer by any means, I'd welcome a response from someone more familiar with that).

The second bullet point... huh? "a platform where people write articles then discuss in the comments" is literally a forum, is it not? How is it not a forum? He's saying that he was wasting time writing in forums when he could be writing in forums instead. I don't get it. I guess he's saying he prefers to write the initial entry of the thread rather than one of the responses? Seems like a pointless distinction to me.

His question as to how a forum is supposed to stay alive when advertisement isn't very lucrative also doesn't really mean anything. There are plenty of businesses that stay alive without a "lucrative" income stream, all you need to do is operate within the means provided by your non-lucrative income stream. For something like Reddit that means don't spend huge amounts of dollars supporting buggy video hosting when you don't need to, don't waste your programmers' resources developing features your users don't want, and so forth. Hosting a simple text forum should not be all that costly, even on a scale as big as Reddit, and there's plenty of ways to monetize the fact that you've got all that data and all that user attention coming your way. Reddit seems to have consistently made poor decisions in this regard. That's Reddit's problem, not a problem with fora in general.

We'll see with the Fediverse, I guess. If collectively a bunch of hobbyists can provide the resources needed to keep all of this running out of pocket or based off of whatever advertising and donations they can scrape together then Reddit could have too.

He thinks we are. I never thought about it before. Maybe in the case of some Reddit subreddits and other forums, but I don't think so in general. I've got a lot great information from forums.

I agree that we're not past the days of forums. Part of what made forums and Reddit great was that you knew that you were interacting with multiple people, and that a lot of information was filtered through some form of consensus. If the advice given was wrong, you usually had additional replies saying it was incorrect, and pointing out what was wrong, or the OP adding more information if asked/incorrect.

You can't really do that as easily with blogs and things, both because it's usually written by one person with presumably little verification (who may have unclear credentials if you're not familiar with them, or that area of work), even before the rise of AI and auto-generated SEO blogs which say nothing useful with a lot of words.

From a usability standpoint, there is also something nice about a forum, since they're usually not that terribly infested with ads, or things like algorithms designed to push content and keep people on the platform. You can just come and go as you please, although necroposting is usually frowned upon. At most, you might have some sorting that keeps the posts in chronological/activity order, but that's about it.

The only problem is the "<how to solve this issue> reddit" google search. If these discussions start to be on lemmy and we append lemmy instead of reddit, in time there's gonna be tons of malicious instances that fill the site with ads and generate content with AI just to get to that google 1st page.