zlacker

My thoughts exactly. People ask for paid options in lieu of ads and tracking, but when sites like YouTube and Reddit offer paid plans at reasonable prices ($3-$10/mo) there is an equal amount of outrage. You will never be able to please users who simply want to pay nothing.

>>paxys+(OP)
The outrage is usually because those sites deliberately go out of their way to compromise the experience for those that don’t pay.

>>paxys+(OP)
Reddit doesn't supply a valuable service. They basically just ran and squatted on the concept of "internet forum" and used VC/network effects to bully almost all the normal forums into (temporary) nonexistence.

Anyone reading this can make their own Reddit-esque forum on a VPS and serve a few thousand people for a few bucks a month. And if Reddit ever kicks out all the polished app users/old.reddit users, you'll see that start happening a hell of a lot more

>>Firmwa+12
Which is funny because Internet forums used to be a software package you acquire and run on your own servers. No one really asked for a centralized system where you didn't have any control. It seems pretty straight-forward to go back to that original idea.

>>Firmwa+12
Anyone reading this can spin a discord namespace ("guild"/"server") and that's what reddit is competing with, even if they don't realize that.

>>SSLy+r3
I think youre right. People are always trying to imagine the next reddit and its not going to be some clone like voat or whatever. Hackernews is actually a lot like reddit used to be but its not going to scale to reddits size without subreddits, or the like.

I dont know if anything will overtake Reddit for a very long time because of network effects. But discord is probably the best guess. Although I actually think people do want centralization. They want 1 login to 1 website that has everything.

>>SSLy+r3
Discord is tomorrow’s Reddit, except it’s even more siloed and it can’t be indexed.

>>pb7+ua
Yes, true. I'm not a defender or proponent of discord by any measure, but I do see them as the most serious competitor for the same kind of communities that hang out on the more focused subreddits.

>>pb7+ua
Half of my reddit usage is "X review Reddit". Discord would never fill in that niche.

>>Firmwa+12
That is irrelevant. They are offering a service. If you find value in it then pay for it. Otherwise use something else.

>>paxys+(OP)
I'm not going to pay YouTube for their service only for them to harvest my data to sell for even more money.

If I could just pay for the service without Google's malicious intents, then I would have no problem paying for YouTube Premium.

Same goes for Reddit and all the other bad actors.

>>paxys+Ws
They don't really offer a service, though. They just built a toll gate and tricked people into needing to cross through it. An ever-increasingly annoying, crappy toll gate at that.

Presumably that's why they haven't booted old.* users yet. They realize that a really substantial amount of their network effects and their moat stem from quality posts by people using computers.

Reddit is about to fuck around and find out, and unfortunately I think they're going to find out that people will just dump everything into even more annoyingly gated-off Discord communities