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On the contrary, I see Reddit as being extremely difficult to replace, precisely because of those 17 years of investment by users. Reddit is a gold mine of information related to any topic you can imagine, and that information won't magically migrate to another platform without serious network traction by a large user base.

>>Fyreze+(OP)
> On the contrary, I see Reddit as being extremely difficult to replace, precisely because of those 17 years of investment by users.

I said its "never been easier to replace", which is different than "easy to replace".

If Reddit continues to drive its most invested users and moderators off the platfrom, it becomes significantly easier. But even with continued bad choices by leadership, Reddit will likely follow the Flickr path: Gently coasting into irrelevance, selling itself once or twice along the way.

My prediction: Reddit will ultimately be bought for its corpse^H^H^H^H^H corpus of text content, and so will live forever through LLMs. People of 2073 will wonder why their bots occasionally reply, "Thanks for the gold, kind stranger!"

>>Fyreze+(OP)
It's a bit of both. The wealth of knowledge in Reddit would be extremely difficult to replace. But that history isn't exactly what keeps people on reddit or helps perpetuate the platform, it's just a valuable goldmine of information.

That history doesn't keep the platform going though. People and networks will migrate to a new platform, start building a new knowledge base, and reddit will slowly rot

>>Fyreze+(OP)
I used to use Reddit for this purpose, but many of the things I’d try to look up on Reddit, I can more readily ask ChatGPT about. This form of network effect of reddit will likely weaken over time.

Edit: So in some sense all that information has magically migrated to a new platform through the mystical power of DL.

>>D0TheM+z6
And ChatGPT will write all of this up https://www.reddit.com/r/UsbCHardware/comments/14fupdk/dock_... for you. Absolutely. I can see that happening. Even the opening of it which is just a recital of various standards, well compare to https://chat.openai.com/share/bbb32735-26c7-48c7-9293-a33020... this. It says "If your USB-C port supports DisplayPort Alt Mode or HDMI Alt Mode" we know it does not support HDMI alt mode because that's a paper only standard, there were never any implementations of it and the HDMI Forum this January killed it. ChatGPT didn't mention HBR2, HBR3, DSC, MST all of which are vital to understand the problem.

I am mentioning this only because I wrote this today and even as someone as knowledgeable about USB C as anyone possibly can, there are big unknowns here and automated aggregation of knowledge could help. But it doesn't.

But you know what, I actually asked ChatGPT for this, it recommends a dual monitor DisplayLink (!!) dock for this case. Complete trash. It concludes with "on such cases, it's recommended to consult with a hardware specialist" without telling you how to do that.

https://chat.openai.com/share/517b831b-db36-40c3-b7bf-7c1c0e...

But let's not tout my own horn. I just moved to Malta and I already knew the selection will be low and I will need to shop all over the EU and get the packages sent with a package forwarder. Now, the /r/malta sub recommends shipmybox and shiplowcost both of which are Malta destination only, focused on this special market, reliable and relatively cheap -- and near impossible to find via Googling. ChatGPT recommends shipito, myus and forward2me all of which are global companies. It's not much better than Googling especially given the forward2me reviews on ... guess what, Reddit.

When I ask ChatGPT about that it says "Forward2Me has generally received positive reviews and is considered a reliable package forwarding service" but https://www.reddit.com/r/amiibo/comments/xzlnsh/does_anyone_... https://www.reddit.com/r/internationalshopper/comments/ucww6... there are worrying reviews

https://chat.openai.com/share/0e14cf2c-8a19-4210-97aa-2a90a3...

How many more you want?

>>Jarwai+L5
It's all already archived. The platform has severely harmed knowledge generation. That's why they are trying to take back the subreddits. But they are only pushing the small group of knowledge givers further away.

>>Fyreze+(OP)
> migrate to another platform

I don't think this is the biggest threat. Twitter, being a unitary platform, mainly has to worry about other platforms, or protocols that masquerade as single platforms.

But Reddit is built up of many communities. The 17 years of history is pretty valuable to Reddit, Inc, of course. Lots of long-tail search eyeballs. But the people actually generating that valuable information are generally focused on the latest discussion, not the history. I think the threat here is the various communities going other places. One by one or in pieces, scattered across many sites and tools.

As a proof of concept here, look at patriots.win, birthed from /r/The_Donald: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald#Patriots.win

It's just not that hard to set up an online forum. Reddit captured those many communities because it was even easier, and because Reddit Inc acted as good stewards. We'll see how this plays out, but I could easily see Reddit being permanently diminished due to its execs unintentionally triggering an open-web rebirth of the independent forum.

>>Fyreze+(OP)
Yet we won’t lose that history if Reddit loses its users and mods. New history will be found in the same place as old - surfaced via Google (discord excluded).

>>Fyreze+(OP)
> On the contrary, I see Reddit as being extremely difficult to replace, precisely because of those 17 years of investment by users. Reddit is a gold mine of information related to any topic you can imagine, and that information won't magically migrate to another platform without serious network traction by a large user base.

It doesn't have to. An archive won't save Reddit if the action wants to move elsewhere.

If a particular topical community gets going somewhere else, the most popular information will quickly get recreated just through its normal operation.

>>chx+C7
My comment was mostly about the current trend. In just 4 years we went from GPT-2 to GPT-4, and the pace seems accelerating. Only a fool points to the limits of current technology to make claims about future technology, the less foolish look at trend lines. The even less foolish have causal models, but even in this case, ChatGPT’s user trendline is faster growing than Reddit’s. Though this tells you little about whether they’re substitutes.

>>D0TheM+qi
OK let me be simple

It will always be garbage

This is a hype road. There's nothing. There never will be anything.

It's just automated plagiarism.

The advantage of Reddit is genuinely new content which this method can't ever create.

>>chx+vH
>The advantage of Reddit is genuinely new content

you should tell that to reddtors. I believe they complain quite a bit about reposts, the same questions being asked, bots, and more.

>>johnny+JK
Some != all

Stochastic parrot: inherently no new content

Reddit: some new content.

>>chx+Ah1
I'm sure there's new content on Tumblr too, even if we'd veer the opposite way and say that "Tumblr has nothing", which is equally exaggeratory.

So, what's the line? How much noise are we welling to dig through to find "some new content"? I'd argue reddit has enough noise to at least bring the question up.

>>wpietr+Fb
A good few subs have already quite fluidly moved over to lemmy. Sure, you're not taking the archives with you, but if that's really what you're after, surely you can afford the price of "free" for wget.