Comment by scythe
7 months ago
I think this is basically misguided. Digg failed because their commenter UX was clunky. It tried to split the baby between linear and tree comments and just ended up being a mess. Reddit had been slowly stealing traffic from Digg for years by the time of the "rebellion".
In the end, Reddit became many times larger than Digg ever was. The biggest problem with displacing Reddit as such is that currently most of the users hate most of the users; consequently there is no reason that people leaving Reddit would want to converge on a single alternative.
In some ways, Reddit has already survived its own replacement. The workflow for getting involved with a video game community is to ask on Reddit which Discord you should join. In this case Discord plays the role of a parasitoid wasp.
It hangs on as a less reactionary NextDoor and a gathering place for semi-serious discussion of niche topics (/r/MedicalPhysics, for example). It also hosts some political stuff, but nobody wants to invite Reddit's political elements to their new community.
> Digg failed because their commenter UX was clunky
Is this why it failed? I recall they started doing pay-for-placement, gaming their own voting system at a time when they were neck-at-neck with Reddit, which wasn't. I do remember Digg's UX getting shittier and shittier though; every time I checked back on it to see if it was worth visiting again it was always mind-blowingly worse.
Fair assessment.
I think Reddit right now sits in some weird space between Discord/Nextdoor/Quora, with most content posted after ~2018-2019 being extremely low quality, outside of some niche subreddits.
But overall it is just a gateway to other platforms where the really interesting conversations are happening and content is being created.
> with most content posted after ~2018-2019 being extremely low quality, outside of some niche subreddits.
I've read plenty of garbage on Reddit, but what percentage of Reddit content since 2018 do you think you've seen? How many zeros after that decimal point?
That's not how sampling works.
That's the equivalent of asking what % of Google Search results have you seen in order to say that there's been a drop in result quality.
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The UX was only part of the problem with Digg. There were also problems with what was/wasn't making it to the front page, pushing ads, the removal of customization features and killing off of third party tools which gave users more control over how they used the site, etc.