Comment by irjustin
6 days ago
> Reddit was knowingly ruined by google. Once google pushed reddit to the top of search results
Ehhhhh I agree and yet also disagree (it's fun though).
Yes they were ruined by being promoted by algo changes, but do I blame google directly? For me, no.
It's exactly as we stated before, it's because it was so trustworthy. Individual people's personal experience with X or Y many times with good details. That earned a lot of strong backlinks, blogs, etc. The domain became authoritative especially on esoteric searches. Then algo changes came (remember pandas?) and pushed them even further. I mean that's the point of search systems right? Get you to trustworthy information that you're looking for.
Then the money grabbers showed up.
So it's just like Harvey Dent said - either you die a trusted niche community or live long enough to see yourself become weaponized for money. He was so smart, that Harvey Dent.
So then why haven’t the higher credibility people in each niche set up an alternative?
Why let reddit drag down the credibility of well everyone in their niche by association. Even if it’s only a tiny bit per year, that adds up over time.
Beyond my pay grade but I'll take a stab (meaning I'm talking out of my ass).
Some in fact have but the majority? Probably laziness, but laziness is just misaligned incentive-goals.
Communities have very little incentive to de-reddit. It's actually a huge amount of work and they gain almost nothing directly.
Separately, I was thinking you know HNews is pretty immune to this problem because we don't have a central theme or something, right?
But no, that just means I can't see how I'm being monetized is all. Blind leading the blind.
Stack Exchange Network has more niche networks that are higher quality than the subreddits now.