But there was reddit.com for people to migrate to.
Let's see the 99% figure out the fediverse.
I think the Fediverse will slowly pick up steam, and perhaps rival reddit in 5 or 10 years. Which is fine. One long-term advantage of the Fediverse is that it's more immune to corporate shenanigans. And ultimately, for all of us, this is a long game.
It's like if McDonalds instead of just opening more stores decided that it can make even more money if it turned into a bar and grill because steaks have higher margins.
The redesign is basically unusable for me. And it's astounding how much data it has to pull down compared to old.reddit.com even with ads blocked just to load a page.
Like, it's just really shoddy work from the ground up. If hosting really was the problem, there's a LOT of lower lying fruit for them to clean up.
Digg decided that taking user submissions didn't make them enough money so they changed the model to letting sites pay to submit links. Digg basically turned into PRWire with a comment section.
This and other issues pissed off a lot of users. Then there was a massive protest where all the submissions and comments said go over to Reddit. Reddit's user base ballooned with former Digg users. Digg went forward with its stupid submission changes and a significant percentage of users stayed on Reddit and Digg became a ghost town of PR submissions and astroturf comments.
Like Reddit the value of Digg existed almost entirely in its user base. Once the users left there was no utility left in the site. It was a darling of "crowd sourced" content so without the crowd there was no content.
Plus compared to Reddit, any kind of real discussion was a pain in the ass. (As opposed to a bunch of people sequentially shouting into the void in an un-threaded manner.)
this new version of digg reeks of VC meddling. It's cobbling together features from more popular sites and departing from the core of digg, which was to "give the power back to the people."
Maybe in another 15 years, whichever successor to Reddit is found unsustainable/unreliable (decentralized or not), everyone left with a dire need of niche online subcommunities shrugs their shoulders and moves on once again. I don't see them having another choice. The need for online communities will always be there in my mind, especially since the existence of Reddit has proven that it can be done, and someone will build something else that everyone conditioned on these forums will use eventually.
I hold out hope, but an unlikely outcome is the mainstream somehow attaches itself to a service with a different funding model like Wikipedia or AO3, or these kinds of message boards are treated like public utilities. It will still be a massive burden to administer, but the outcomes could be different. I remember reading how "critical" subreddits were given a pass from the blackouts like /r/Ukraine because the value of their information trumps anything related to Reddit operations. A part of me thinks that Reddit's current playbook takes into account that some parts of its existence have become too important for mods/users to shut down, and that seems different to Digg's situation in 2010. They simply weren't as big as Reddit today. This is uncharted territory.
Regardless, in my mind, a lot of things in life don't last forever, not just Digg or (soon possibly) Reddit. But lots of people rode the wave regardless for 15+ years, and have gained a lot of useful knowledge from Reddit in the meantime.
So people will inevitably flock to other closed platforms like Discord because those platforms are the objectively superior choices, and they're not ideal for various reasons, but in my mind you just have to meet people where they are. And I think a service like Discord could absolutely implode with a few misplaced administrative changes. But at this point I tend to see these things as part of a greater circle of life, and it's (probably) not like they're going to implode almost immediately in quick succession. Just that your time spent there is a part of a particular nexus in a particular point of human history, and it's going to be limited. So, enjoy it while it lasts.