The demise of Reddit is happening right now. Thoughts?

alternadiv

alternadiv

Well-known member
If you use Reddit, you're probably very aware of what I'm talking about but I'll edit this post with some links in a minute.
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What this is about:
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People are looking for an alternative to Reddit but they all suck in their own ways. On that note, I've been seeing a lot of people talking about "old Internet forums" and how they should come back, etc. So that's cool to hear.
 
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I've always found searches that end in Reddit akin to searching for a meatball in a barrel of spaghetti so I don't use it. However recently, literally in the last couple of weeks for me, something seems to has changed, the meatballs are more plentiful and the layout is a whole lot cleaner. It might be because I've recently installed an ad-blocker but regardless, I've found the site actually has a purpose now.

Back on topic I've seen a number of platforms place restrictions on their API in recent months and the result is always the same. Raised pitchforks from the platform members and the loss of multiple developers. However things usually settle down in time as members migrate and adapt to other apps and the initial angst is all but forgotten. The main loss seems to be to the hobby app developer.

So no, I doubt it'll have much of a long term impact to such an established platform.
 
Alternadiv said:
People are looking for an alternative to Reddit but they all suck in their own ways. On that note, I've been seeing a lot of people talking about "old Internet forums" and how they should come back, etc. So that's cool to hear.
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That was my first thought. Back to the forums! :)

For some reason I never liked Reddit. Maybe now I'll start using it to recommend XenForo :D
 
10 years ago this thread would have gotten 500 posts within 1 day. Huge news for all of us forum owners.
But right now my reply is the 11th post in this thread. How pathetic.

"Talk about the pot calling the kettle black."

The demise of Reddit? Demise you say, hmm...

In any case, back to topic, many people want to leave Reddit because their native app sucks, it is bloated, they want to force-feed ads, their admin (CEO) lies etc. whereas those 3rd-party apps were good.

Now can we as XF forums offer a good user experience for mobile phones for these digital refugees? Is the new relased PWA in any shape or form a serious alternative? No.

So, there is an opportunity right now we can't take advantage of because our platform lacks a lot of things.

Is there any hope for our platform for the future at least? Also no.

So, who cares? We are irrelevant and we will stay irrelevant, at least the majority of us. When they talk alternatives for reddit, which I have seen in multiple subreddits, none of them mentioned a traditional forum be it engineered by XF, IPS, vB or WBB etc. They all look for the same experience and centralised discussion place they have on reddit (and had on digg).

I am past that stage of "dreaming". I mean, recently you all have seen what happened to Twitter with Elon doing Elon things and a lot of people left Twitter. Did anyone get a significant boost in their forums because of that exodus? Facebook (or Meta) is also struggling especially with the younger folks, did anyone grab those teenagers/young adults on their platforms? The reality is, the average forum user is 35+ and our numbers are shrinking every day because we are irrelevant.

Google search doesn't spit out forums in its results anymore. I have so many different interests and google a lot of different things and all I see are those useless piece of crap generic Wordpress articles filled with SEO keywords OR I get it from reddit. I can't remember the last time I landed on a forum by using a google search. Wait, to be honest, if I think about it, a month ago I was playing Resident Evil 4 Remake and the camera settings were making me dizzy because of the zoom in/out. So I had to find a mod to disable that and landed on nexus modding forums which I left immediately because it sucked. Instead I downloaded the mod on their main page where the main content is (who would have thought?). Hmm, I am rambling, anyway, reddit is where things at these days and their demise will not spark anything for us.
 
I spend more time on my forum than any social media platforms.
Why?
Because nearly all of social media has some familiar people who just laugh react and make some stupid comment about me or about my avatar or whatever it is.
I spend time reporting these people because all they do is abuse others.
if they are on my forum i redirect them to reddit and make them play on that platform.
They have a good rule on there which gets ripped up and causes more overmoderation.
A bit like a facebook group i'm in. They're very strict. They don't allow people to post up memes and gifs and they do they get permananned from the group.
they ask for recipes for things their grandparents used to cook.
So they have to be strict.
 
sbj said:
Google search doesn't spit out forums in its results anymore.
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It does for me (in my areas of interest). Including my own forum and others in the same topic area.

My forum is coming up on 16 months old, and it's growing very nicely.

I lurk on a Reddit group. It's a VERY different "element" of people and fairly low-brow in terms of the "vibe." Plus Reddit is a linear format, like Facebook. Discussions are not categorized or well-curated. Therefore, finding specific information is tedious if not impossible.

I suppose it can depend on the topic focus. But forums are hardly irrelevant or dead. Rather, I submit the pendulum is swinging back HARD for forums.

It's also worth mentioning that privately-owned forums are not subject to the vicissitudes of "Big Tech" imposing political correctness, overbearing censorship, and wokeism. The public's tolerance for that is wearing VERY thin, which is driving them back to forums.
 
Not sure how reddit is structured as a business however whenever the founder of an online community shifts focus from leading a community to leading his own bank account it goes bye bye. Everyone can sense it. Same holds true for those forums one specific company swallowed up and uniformly runs on a XF-fork.

I remember the very early days of reddit. Enjoyed it. Still do for some niche type lookups. It is fantastic to quickly get into a new thing and learn the basics of that thing.

It is completely useless on social and political type discussions due to censorship, circle jerking and group repeat think. (Irregardless what world view bias one has unless it aligns to a T with the hive mind).

Forums never died... their users simply went elsewhere. Initially it was the advent of social media technology. When FB etc came around it was simply easier to share a photo compared to XF, VB or whatever big forum software of the day. Or the monopoly of having FB/IG pre-installed in smartphones. That gap is now narrow and forum operators can easily fine tune a XF server to be screaming fast and convenient with theme/template tweaking. Slowly XF or all operating system catch up on push notifications as well. File hosting is very very cheap. I for example allow my users 100mb video file uploads...and more and more they are no longer IG/YT shares...no they straight up upload them directly.

Now I think the winner in online community is the one that can manage to hold a community together and they simply can not. Their focus is share prices and as the current global recension builds up and money itself is the bubble only true value will prevail. Simple as.

I started to read parenting books and apply the same principles to my community as I see the admin/mods as parents and the users as children. Seen, Save, Secure, Soothed Siegel 4s and it actually works. Its the human touch the AI that they bank on will never ever reach and the users can sense it. They all secretly crave the 4s. Give it to them and they can't help but to come back and be part of it.

I personally enjoy the decline to be honest and knew it would happen long time ago.
 
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Reddit is probably the worst of the lot of the social media platforms.

It's overmoderation is sending people away from that platform.

The point is if you're going to overmoderate your own forums just like reddit does expect to have not many users on your forum.
 
Tracy Perry said:
The areas that I use with them are just fine... it's simply those that act like blooming idiots that tend to get moderated.
The biggest issue is not the "over moderation" but the difficulty of finding content a month or so later after it is posted easily.
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Nup. it's the overmoderation. It goes too far.
If they let people post what they wanted instead of being so strict on everyone you won't have problems like what @Brogan did. Look at his thread called so much for reddit.
 
aussiefooty said:
Nup. it's the overmoderation. It goes too far.
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No, what "goes to far" is exaggeration... in the ENTIRE time I've been involved in Reddit.. I've NEVER been moderated... and that's a 3+ year period and I'm fairly active in several areas of interest. I can point you at SEVERAL threads that I've participated in that I've got knowledgable replies... so a 1-off instance doesn't "damn" the entire environment.
Maybe what "goes too far" is what one posts in certain areas? Post poop... get poop thrown back at ya'. And yes, there are certain "reddits" that are inhabited by certified ass-hats... but is that any different than some forums?
Is Reddit perfect? Nope. Can you get adequate data from Reddit posted questions.. sometimes. But how is that any different than a stand-alone forum? The ONLY big benefit that Reddit has is it's a central site that can offer mobile apps direct access to it since it is singular in nature.
 
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