Comment by dpark
2 days ago
Reddit was an also-ran to Digg for half a decade. They literally were not the first mover. Meanwhile, Claude Code very much has a first mover advantage that Anthropic is trying to entrench and capitalize on.
> Plus its product utility scaled with user count.
Which should mean it’s more impactful for Reddit to lose a set of engaged users. The value that Reddit brings to its customers is directly proportional to how many customers maintains. The same is not true for Anthropic.
Digg (or Slashdot before it) wasn't Reddit in the same way that HN isn't Reddit: aggregators vs community discussions. 2/4chan or BBSs would have been the previous alternatives.
What was the scaled pre-existing topic-divided community-moderated discussion space?
It's difficult to say Claude Code has first mover advantage when these discussions are littered with people talking about their alternative preferred toolchains.
> The value that Reddit brings to its customers is directly proportional to how many customers maintains. The same is not true for Anthropic.
I'd question Anthropic's ability to fund Claude Code engineering vs their peer competitors, should they slip user count.
Digg and Reddit were basically the same product addressing the same market. When Digg imploded, their user base largely moved to Reddit. HN was also explicitly created as a Reddit clone.
Reddit did not have community discussions originally. That came later (but before the Digg exodus).