zlacker

> One can only hope there'll be a watershed moment like the one that killed Digg.

I think a critical part of the Digg exodus was that most people already saw Reddit as a clear #2 in the space. When Digg fucked up, there was an obvious place for everyone to migrate to. I don't see that right now. Facebook isn't cool anymore, Twitter has a large number of people who won't use it because of Elon, Mastodon isn't mature enough to gain casual users.

Bascially, the problem I see is that if people leave reddit, there isn't an obvious place for them to go? TikTok maybe? I just don't see an Pepsi to Reddit's Coke.

>>superf+(OP)
Mh, it feels like there has been little to no innovation and competition between companies about social media that are primarily text-based. Mastodon is in essence a decentralized Twitter. All new social networks seem to be about media other than text. The only text-centric new entry that comes to mind is Substack, but that's not really a social network product. Maybe it's time for a new innovator?

>>superf+(OP)
Single interest web-bbs systems is a definite option. Can always self-host discourse open-source. There's also many other options, including the Lamernews (HN clone) app.

>>superf+(OP)
The key thing reddit has is subreddits. Maybe they could be implemented using BlueSky's custom feeds?

>>ajmurm+g1
seems that text-based social media are not profitable (enough).

>>superf+(OP)
Discord seems the most likely, it matches the subreddit model and a lot of Reddit communities already have a discord.

Obviously Discord is chat focused so not a one-to-one replacement but I am not sure that the younger generations will care.

Plus there is the possibility of discord adding a Reddit/forum like feature, since they already have the mindshare.

>>wilson+Ea
Discord stopped being cool when it started censoring subs for wrongthink, about 4 years ago.

>>wilson+Ea
Please god no. So much info is already getting dumped to discord and nowhere else making searching or archiving impossible, we don't need more of that.

>>wilson+Ea
> Discord seems the most likely

Reddit is about discovering content. How would you discover anything on Discord? Is there a trending list to see the top messages? Is there a way to list Discord communities so you can discover ones matching your interest?

I'm at a lost to how the two are similar in any way except for the "young generations" use them both.

>>wilson+Ea
Discord already has forums.

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/6208479917079-...

>>ctvo+ae
I doubt anyone actually used the front page to discover things, most likely they will stick to a handful of subreddits.

>>Vexs+Bd
that's part of the appeal nowadays, it seems websites and apps don't see the point of making themselves freely searchable anymore

>>wilson+Ea
Discord already has a forum feature, it’s just rarely used.

>>ctvo+ae
You can search for public servers in the Discord app by keyword, but not for specific posts across all servers. It's more comparable to Reddit but without the frontpage, or structured posts.

>>superf+(OP)
Reddit is just a backend to apolo, if they make their own backend, a lot of people would switch.

>>wilson+Ea
Discord ties together Reddit, YouTube, Twitch and other web communities too: podcasts, webcomics, Patreon.

Only issue I’m having with it is discoverability of new communities.

>>witche+7f
I use the "Home" and the "Popular" tabs every day to discover things on reddit. I can't be alone with this

>>Vexs+Bd
This is a selling point of Discord. The ability to have a conversation without "researchers" being able to search for it for decades.

>>witche+7f
There are dozens of us.

>>rhtgrg+be
Tbf Discord forums are so catastrophically badly designed in terms of UI that they're pretty much unusable.

Ultimately if you want good discussion you need the same layout that Reddit and HN have, with indented comments and easily branching chains. Otherwise it's just a chat masquerading as a forum thread which is useless.

>>witche+7f
My partner scrolls through the popular section nightly reading interesting things and chuckling at memes. I think you're out of touch with how many people use Reddit in this casual, low investment way.

>>teolan+Hh
i'd argue it's closer to slack than reddit

>>moffka+An
The best UI would probably be a mixture of a forum and reddit. A fourm is a much superior model because it lacks upvotes/downvotes and is chronologically ordered, but lacks branching and chains that you describe. Reddit currently is being used more similarly to the forum culture than anything else.

>>Euphor+ri
I actually brought up this same idea elsewhere in this thread. Apparently, Apollo is a single developer though, so the main problem I see with this is time. Reddit switches over to new pricing July 1st, so this one person would have a single month to build out a new backend that would need to support tens of thousands of users and I just don't see that happening even if we assume they can hire a team of contractors and scaled it down to just core features.

>>wilson+Ea
I disagree. A lot of other people are pointing out the discoverability problem (which I agree is an issue), but I think the medium just isn't comparable.

Chat is ephemeral and it there's a certain amount of participation expected, where as Reddit content strikes a nice balance of changing frequently, but not instantaneous and, for most users, it's a passive activity. To put it another way, most people aren't doom-scrolling on a discord server.

>>edande+2n
For many of us, Discord’s model is an anti-pattern.

Try searching for something when you don’t recall where you said it (dc server or DM)

>>superf+es
Judging from this thread: I bet the Apollo dev could easily secure enough VC to eat reddit's lunch in short order. There would be no shortage of talent willing to take down goliath.

>>willis+Lz
How many of us are unemployed or underemployed after getting laid off. I got nothing going on hah.

Pick me, I'll build and scale your social media site. I already did it once too hah

>>ctvo+Jo
They still need the content creators to create :) which I think they have done a good job of at least creating FOMO of top posts gathering monitory props.

>>superf+Xt
It's also linear. Reddit has hierarchical reply/conversation trees. Even Facebook has that to some degree. Discord doesn't.

>>edande+2n
Doesn't Discord keep the data forever? And potentially sell it to "researchers"?

>>edande+2n
Discord no doubt keeps every conversation ever typed on their servers. they might toss out something huge like a movie file but text compresses -very- well.

>>moffka+An
they could be made better though if reddit's death seems imminent because of a beancounter incursion.

>>superf+(OP)
honestly i've been on tiktok/instagram since the pandemic, text forums don't have the same appeal as instantly making a video reply and seeing people react to it. i don't visit reddit/other forums as much anymore - the bot replies and quality of user are super annoying now.

>>nagyf+Zk
I use /r/all exclusively. I have an account and subscribe to subreddits, but I never go to the home screen. I do check some subreddits directly. Otherwise just /r/all.

>>Vexs+Bd
Sending something to discord is like sending it to /dev/null except that it is also diverted into the mailbox of Big Brother, with you having only very limited access to it on their whim.

>>wilson+Ea
I hope this is not the case. In my experience, Discord has always been clunky, very slow, and truly unmanageable (from a user’s perspective).

>>superf+es
All the other mobile cliets could switch to a compatible backend API as well. Apollo is only an iOS client. There are a number of Android and ross-platform clients as well. Such as RedditIsFun or Baconreader or Infinity. What would be missing is a web frontend.

>>Euphor+ri
Now while that's nice, who's going to pay for that? Certainly not Apollo / other third party reddit users. And so, at most you'd get a honeymoon period out of this, while burning someone else's money, until they get fed up, and monetize or close the service. Similar to what happened to Imgur.

>>superf+(OP)
It’s already moving to discord.

Discord blows for asynchronous conversations. But that doesn’t mean it’s not the replacement.

>>witche+7f
the vast majority of reddit users today do not do anything beyond scroll through default subreddits and the front page, people who curate their own experience to ONLY be what they selected are an extreme minority.

>>superf+Xt
This, and also that chat platforms don't really have a crowd voting system. The thing I like about HN is that people can vote on content to have it promoted or demoted. Obviously this has its own issues, but I'm not aware of any big social platforms that do this. Twitter kind of does, but it functions a bit different.

>>wilson+Ea
Absolutely not. Discords UX is a hot mess for its intended use case, absolutely no way it is good enough to flex to being a Reddit.

>>OrvalW+Iv
Search the .CSVs yourself?