Users shouldn’t be forced so aggressively into using an ‘app’ - whether the official one or a 3rd-party app - when mobile web browsers are so very capable.
I wonder if there is a "fediverse" for something like forums? I can never get into mastodon because it's not like forums and conversations between people are quite hard if you don't follow them.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
Users->Discovery Mechanism->Topics->Threads with all of the trimmings.
Maybe that will be reddit's Digg exodus moment.
I read a thread on reddit about the api fees where commenters called out HN as the next site to move to. Hopefully not.
Usenet. But it fell out of fashion around the turn of the millenium.
People keep bringing this up and I feel like there's a fundamental misunderstanding going on. The internet of 2010 is not the internet of today, not even close.
The average reddit user of today isn't going to stop using reddit due to problems like this because they just don't care, at all. They don't care about the new web design being a massive downgrade over the old one because they're used to every website looking like that, they have no complaints, many of them probably don't even know the old design still exists. They don't care that the app sucks and is full of ads because, again, most official apps for most websites are like that, it's the new normal. They just want to scroll through funny meme videos on their phone for a while and don't think about it beyond that, the age of the average user having standards is long, long gone.
Closest thing I can think of is the .win communities which are very reddit-like in interface, but unfortunately mostly uh.... radical.
Reddit itself was open-source until 2018. I wonder if someone could easily spin up a docker container that allows one to self-host a local instance (e.g. one subreddit)
https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6
Oddly enough I can't find it actually on his blog.
This is just the natural lifecycle of all things involving humans. Why people want the same stuff to remain dominant forever is baffling to me. I can imagine nothing worse. Reddit dying off to leave space for something new and fresh is a good thing.
Social media sites do seem to go through the cycle even faster though--probably because they're essentially digital nightclubs. We all know of that one hip club that everybody waited in line for in our 20s, and then suddenly the drinks get too expensive and the crowd gets older and uncool...and then suddenly there's no line out front anymore. And there's a new spot in town where the young people cluster.
Before Reddit there was Digg. After Reddit, I'm confident there will be something else.
The people making up reddit might have been replaced with completely different people - with different motivations, behaviors, and expectations.
It's more about the business side than the human side, the social need will always be there but the business aspect taints it. At least the modern corpo "let's IPO and become billionaires, fuck the people, and chase endless growth" taint it more so.