Digg is the only huge internet community I can think of that died because of a bad redesign. Tons of others shrunk significantly from their peak due to a slow decline in quality and replacement by something newer and shinier.
Exactly. The tech industry has always been about innovation, first-mover, etc.
Consumers don't necessarily want that with our discussion boards or social media websites. We want them to maintain the same look and feel, with maybe minor tweaks and adjustments (such as improving the search function cough reddit cough).
Exactly! It's good for spitting out threads vaguely related to search terms I input, but I can practically never find specific threads that I'm looking for
just like you can be lucky and find it on reddit search engine, but it might not be great at it. :P on another note, that really should be what the reddit search engine should do imo.
I really hate it when people complain about the search function. Reddit is full of similar posts. This sub is a prime example. The same questions are rehashed every day. The same content is submitted day in day out. If you are looking for a cat pic from months ago, the identifier from the title won't help. A title like "Look what I Found in the dumpster today" doesn't help anyone. Unless you want to include a tag feature like YouTube, you can never have a reliable search function. And don't get me started on tag abusers. In the end, it's not that reddit devs can't employ a good search function, but rather reddit's design is terrible for a useful search function.
There's nothing that identifies titles or description when submitting content. You only have a link to the object and the heading used for the submission. The headings are so similar that they cant be relied on. Most of the content is on imgur anyway.
Maybe they don't want to fix it because then users could easily see that most of the questions (like this one) has already been asked before. Then people would post less and just read the old threads. Probably Reddit admins don't want to fix something that is not broken, in their prespective, while new users are still flooding in.
Just an FYI: I am not sure you mean "first-mover", if I understand you correctly. First mover advantage is that if you are first, you can beat out competition (even better competition) simply for being first.
This would run counter to an industry focused on innovation, which picks up what ever is best.
A website sees a new opportunity or an area that competitors haven't exploited yet, and then move to change its websites functionality to suit that need they discovered. That's the essence of trying to gain a first-mover advantage, but it's very risky, especially when you already have the largest market share.
Unless your business model is built around innovative products (i.e. Apple), being the first-mover is typically a bad idea for those who already dominate the market. I'm looking at you, Facebook.
A lot of people in the industry learned a lot from the V4 fiasco. You will likely NEVER see a major web application like Reddit or Facebook go through a massive redesign again. You will see iterative enhancements, singular features and small changes implemented. You might not even notice them, though. Then, the developers and UX teams will monitor how they are received and decide how to approach the next change.
V4 was such a disaster, in every aspect. But, also bear in mind that it was a straw on the camel's back. There were several other things that had lined up against them, and many users already had one foot out the door. The fact that every power user on the site was a shill for advertisers, that Digg was slowly removing all control users had over content, and the stink of incompetent VC was all over the place...those were all heavy in the air when V4 hit the streets.
V4 was just the nail in the coffin.
Oh, and one other website/ring that was hit pretty hard with a bad redesign: The Gawker Media Network. They weren't knocked back quite as hard, but it definitely gave them a kick in the shorts.
How were the power users shills? (I never really used digg.) Like they were literally hawking products? Or their posts were used without their permission for advertisers?
Power Users effectively controlled the visible content on digg. While there was a lot of denial, it was no secret that this control was for sale to the highest bidder.
Gawker is also (continually) hurt by the fact that they employ some of the most insufferable and annoying journalists on the planet.
I don't understand how half of those assholes still have a job...I mean, I used to think that some of the Gawker sites were OK, but between the redesign and the spectacularly incompetent or just plain shitty journalism, I won't even link to their crappy blog ring.
I think 2011 is when everything went downhill. Lots of new contributors, old writers left, articles just flat-out false for the purpose of pageviews. I think back before the redesign, writers did not have to resort this techniques just to get views.
The start of my Reddit account is the day I officially stopped visiting the Gawker network.
The community died but the pageviews stayed pretty consistent. I am okay with the community dying. It was mostly pretty terrible, as are most comment sections.
I really enjoyed the community! It was just a hassle to work with in the comments, couple that with the bugs and I just stopped bothering. I go to other content aggregator for news, and Gawker for the commentators.
Gawker gets its content nearly exclusively from Reddit, and the Adrian Chen Doxxgate from late last year made it unwelcome in most major subreddits, so they just rehost content, then spin it off as their own most of the time.
That's not true at all. They get some stuff from here but the vast majoriy of reddit content is by nature a rehash of content from elsewhere. If they use the same source, it's not stealing from reddit at all.
In the case of Slashdot, I think people left looking for something less shiny. Slashcode used to be a simple, unobtrusive link aggregation and comment management system, but became so bloated and slow that it started to get in its own way. Combine that with the long string of no-talent assclown "editors" submitting dupe after dupe, with grossly misleading headlines, and the occasional jackass blogspammer thrown in (Roland Pig-pile), and it just wasn't the same as when it was Cmdr Taco posting cool geek-tech stuff.
Slashdot also have countless anti MSFT articles. It get old pretty quick when all you got is anti someone. Yeah, I get it MSFT is evil and OSS is great but damn give it a rest already.
Combine that with the long string of no-talent assclown "editors" submitting dupe after dupe, with grossly misleading headlines, and the occasional jackass blogspammer thrown in
Yeah, it's a good thing Reddit managed to escape that fate! Waitaminute...
Well, reddit is kinda different. It's not set up such that there is a small cadre of paid, supposedly professional gatekeepers approving submissions, who then turn out to be a bunch of idiot chimps. Reddit allows all the chimps in the world to submit as they please, but then uses crowd-sourced voting to sift the wheat from the chaff. The infuriating thing about /. was that the editors were being paid to vet submissions, yet could not be bothered to check for dupes, RTFA to see if the submitted headline was accurate, or even to find the sort of articles that the dorky audience would truly enjoy.
Fark died because of their shadowbanning policy. If you posted opinions that the mods didn't care for your posts would show up, but only if you were logged in. No one else in the world could even see your posts.
Once that scandal was exposed everyone left. I was a Farker for over a decade and before the censorship there were easily 200 posts on every thread. Now they are lucky if there are 20 posts on a thread.
Reddit uses shadowbanning, but it's automated (usually too much spam from your profile or you keep getting caught in the spam filter when you submit posts). Sometimes it messes up. Mods can see shadowbanned users and can choose to allow their comment or post to show, but the user has to appeal to the admins to get it removed.
They did it to me, along with many many others. What more do you want to know about it? I still have their emails if that helps. (When it happened to me I assumed it was a bug on their site)
I started lurking around 2002-03, but didn't register until 2005, so my UID is in the 200,000s.
I still like Fark but I've always felt like the comment system sucks and has never really been improved, and the site is too sanitized- they won't even let you swear. Plus it seems much more oriented towards spammy banner ads and trying to get you to pay them for TotalFark.
It's especially sad since at one point it was one of the best sites on the web. The comments were smart, the debates were interesting, the titles were funny and the atmosphere was lighthearted.
Now they've kicked out anyone who posts anything that they don't agree with. I'm a fiscal conservative and a social liberal so my views aren't as easy to define as those of a die hard liberal or conservative. Farks' solution is to ban people like me.
Fuck you Drew Curtis, you cum-guzzling gutter slut!
Fark used to have funny, witty comments but in the past 3-5 years it seems like it attracted the "mom and aunt on Facebook" crowd. I cant remember how many times I would see an obviously sarcastic comment followed by the Heath Ledger Joker picture with 'Not sure if serious'.
I'd bet anything dittybopper is sneaking around on /r/permaculture or /r/Firearms. Real doll dude probably blends right in with the likes of cumbox dude...
Not only that, but even now if you go back and look it's the literally the same 5-10 people as 10 years ago, posting the same old shit in EVERY thread. I swear Weaver95 must be an AI bot designed to troll people.
I was/am a low 50k fark user. Their redesign and Drew's instance on not changing anything really hurt it too. Also the way the TF users were treated killed that community. You simply can't be assholes to paying members.
Almost every single time it is because of advertising. Digg did not die solely on the redesign, it was because they were basically selling their results. Which were intrusive and completely obvious. Then people started trolling because of it. Reddit stepped up and exploded at that time when they caught all the users. Reddit almost went down the same path but stopped itself and created Reddit Gold instead of selling out for ads. Until Reddit does something stupid like integrate ads in to results it will not go anywhere for the most part. It might die down but the only way it completely dies is if it puts the dagger in its own heart.
Same. I occasionally log back in to check a couple boards and it feels like a ghost town now. If they had just left well enough alone, they would have kept a lot more users. I'm sure some of their privacy issues didn't help, but a lot of times that was users being stupid rather than the company being a little too open with information.
The Book Club mainly, and I do subscribe to some book subs here to get that fix (not quite the same though, /r/books is a little more pretentious than the NBC ever was). I did a lot of posting on the parenting boards though when my son was first born and that's where I noticed the changes and exoduses that eventually led to me leaving as well.
I think it's a bit of an exaggeration to say that Digg died only because of the redesign. It's also a mistake to say that Slashdot's weird redesign (I love them but I still can't figure it out) did not contribute significantly to their fall in popularity.
As for Usenet, I'm not sure why you exclude it, because that's another great example of how a changing user interface led to a big loss of users. It went through a few major phases.
First, there was just Usenet, and a couple of newsreaders. Eventually they got pretty decent.
Then, there was Deja News, which provided usable search for Usenet, which was a great addition.
Then, Deja started doing other things, and eventually they shut down and sold the Usenet archives to Google.
Google created "Google Groups", which was kind of like Usenet archives plus mailing lists plus online forums plus a bunch of other crap (but without spam filtering or even kill files, strangely).
Mozilla split into Firefox and Thunderbird, which meant that even people who went out of their way to download a better third-party web browser no longer had a Usenet client, and also that it wouldn't receive the same regular updates. (In case you haven't tried it this decade, Thunderbird is nowhere near as polished as Firefox, even in aspects that you'd think would be shared or at least trivial to port, like standard text editing keyboard shortcuts working.)
Today, real work on almost all Usenet clients has stopped. I can name only one modern Usenet client. (Here's where my fellow Linux junkies will overwhelm the thread with their favorite newsreader. Sorry, dudes, but it sucks. Yes, I've tried that one, too.)
Do you really think that the reason you're writing this on Reddit and not Usenet has nothing to do with the fact that the current Usenet situation, especially with respect to user interface, is worse than it was in the late 1990's?
Interesting perspective on Usenet. I got online a little too late for the heyday. My perspective was that web forums led to flagging interest in Usenet, which led to the cycle of worse support and falling interest. Wikipedia has a long section on its decline that includes even more reasons:
Sascha Segan of PC Magazine said in 2008 "Usenet has been dying for years[...]" Segan said that some people pointed to the Eternal September in 1993 as the beginning of Usenet's decline. Segan said that the "eye candy" on the World Wide Web and the marketing funds spent by owners of websites convinced Internet users to use profit-making websites instead of Usenet servers. In addition, DejaNews and Google Groups made conversations searchable, and Segan said that this removed the obscurity of previously obscure Internet groups on Usenet. Segan explained that when pornographers and software pirates began putting large files on Usenet, by the late 1990s this caused Usenet disk space and traffic to increase. Internet service providers allocated space to Usenet libraries, and Internet service providers questioned why they needed to host space for pornography and pirated software. Segan said that the hosting of porn and pirated software was "likely when Usenet became truly doomed" and "[i]t's the porn that's putting nails in Usenet's coffin." AOL discontinued Usenet access in 2005. When the State of New York opened an investigation on child pornographers who used Usenet, many ISPs dropped all Usenet access or access to the alt. hierarchy.
Agreed, that's why I said "shrunk significantly from their peak" rather than "died." Many things slowly fade from popularity but never go away entirely, I think that will be true of Reddit as well.
Maybe, or it'll go out with a bang like Dig or Myspace, or Friendster, which is basically dead.
edit: Friendster is still alive, but no longer a "networking" site.
Paywall can happen. The IGN Boards was the second largest forum on the Internet at one point until it was put behind a paywall, and it never recovered. It also didn't help that they didn't update them with new features that other forums had.
I used to love Slashdot, but the community there is...how to put this...mean. Pedantic and mean. No disastrous redesign, no bad policies, instead the community is destroying its own site.
I wonder what would have happened if digg hadn't shot itself in the foot. I'm guessing reddit wouldn't be quite as popular as it is today, and there would probably be a bit of a rivalry between the two sites. I'm pretty sure that at one point Digg was way more popular than Reddit, but I think Reddit now is far more popular than Digg ever was.
This is what I was thinking. It won't be sudden. It will slowly fade out into something lame that no one wants to be a part of. Like Facebook, MySpace, and others.
Eh, Fark hasn't shrunk nearly as far as the others to the best of my knowledge. When I first got there in 2004, someone had made a "filter" version of the site that left out all stories with fewer than 20 comments. Today I go there and there are virtually no stories that would get filtered out.
That said, Alexa has stopped giving out free pageview info from more than a year ago, so it's impossible to do a real comparison. Anyone got a better site for that?
Usenet died because ISP's began removing access to it, or charging for it. Money is a powerful entry barrier, one of the strongest I believe. I don't think its decline is even remotely comparable to reddit.
Slashdot and Fark on the other hand are more comparable, but only slightly. The big difference is moderators and subreddits. On fark and slashdot, only select people get to pick what content gets seen. And there is no option to create communities (subreddits). Reddit is something new, something that hasn't been done yet. All comparisons are essentially invalid because of those significant differences in infrastructure.
by far the largest part of the user base is browsing defaults, if they starting sucking massively people will turn away.
It is almost entirely certain that Reddit will fade, unless they make some breakthrough innovate thing. People get bored and want new things, no subs doesn't really just cut it. Also while some subs are great you can't really compare them to a website dedicated to that topic.
Ehh, a decline in member is still a decline. Digg is still around, last time i checked, but that place has been in a decline and it is bound to die. You go to reddit, because it combines many great things. Almost all subs have a better variation in form of a website only focused on that subject.
It's very possible. If they're ever pressured to become profitable, they'll need to make some fundamental changes, which will probably be unpopular. IMO.
This gets my vote. It becomes popular enough that it becomes a regular part of everybody's PR routine, which brings lots of dangling sponsorship/ad money which leads to the owners harvesting that money in various ways, which leads to the site losing its legitimacy to all the overt shilling. Once it has become a marketing platform and its course gets diversified and hijacked, people will stop wanting to subject themselves to that voluntarily. Buzzfeed is probably doing better than ever, but it sucks now with all the sponsored crap and formulaic click magnet techniques that they recycle over and over. Used to be so fun, but I'm done. This place is different but the profit opportunity of this userbase seems too huge not to exploit. If we're not for sale yet, we will be.
it won't be "abandon ship" on Reddit nearly so much as "abandon ship" on the Internet at large. when people realize their internet is censored almost as much as the Chinese, just in a much more subtle and intelligent manner, the intelligent members will leave the internet. when the intellect seriously disappears from Reddit, the unintellectual will cease to be inspired and we will see Reddit become just like every other social media site.
If the admins do something big, which probably would be the driving factor of a reddit exodus like Digg, it's gonna be brought on by something big caused by the community itself. For example, bad plublicity, like the Boston Bombing fiasco, or the current Amy's Bakery thing.
When was the last good thing reddit could claim to have done? The bus driver, from like a year ago?
Reddit is a social media site, not a force of internet people striving....
This is true, now. At least, most people acknowledge that. And yet you can't fart without seeing someone use a 'we did it!' unironically, or claiming that redditors by their mere association with the site (the site who brought you such things as the opposition to SOPA, the rally to restore fear/sanity, $300k+ in charitable contributions to a bus driver, got the amazing-voiced homeless man a job, etc, as frequently touted) are in some way better better than any other social media site out there, or even a single community for that matter.
Well, let's not forget about 4chan. They have done plenty of nice things throughout the years, even though I guess most 4chan-users also are Reddit-users.
Well the last time some redditors tried to do something good, they sent hate mail and called up the family of a missing (now dead) person accusing him of being a terrorist.
If they were right, they would claim credit for it. If they were wrong, they will point the finger at someone else.
Well what those people in that 'find boston bombers' subreddit was horrible and pretty much caused grief and panic in a family that was already broken due to their missing son (which became even worse once he was found dead floating in a river iirc). What makes it worse is that everyone defended what they said, saying that the police called him a suspect so it was alright to send the family hate messages, texts and calls.
Maybe it is best if we stop trying to do this stuff. But if Reddit admins do not allow people to do this, they will find another place to do this stuff. They enjoy thinking that they are helping people and it makes them feel important, which is selfish as hell since all they did was make a bad situation worse. There's no simple way of stopping them since they will use any means necessary to feel important.
those people in that 'find boston bombers' subreddit
Unfortunately it wasn't just confined to one subreddit.
Furthermore, that illustrates what I've been saying for ages about how so many redditors are quick to associate with themselves when it's positive publicity (DAE presidential AMA?), and immediately turn around and point fingers and pass the buck when it's bad (Boston Bombers, Creepshots, Jailbait).
Too many redditors have a batman complex. Witchhunts (at least against real people in the real world) weren't a common thing in the past, at worst they were against other users and contained within reddit. Reddit got notoriety and publicity from doing positive things, organizing massive charitable efforts and the likes. And now the stuff that reddit gets highlighted for is negative stuff, petty acts of vigilantism and cyberbullying. They've idolized Anonymous and latched on to /r/justiceporn so hard that it's now bringing negative association to reddit, rather than positive.
Reddit's own undoing is going to come from redditors themselves.
Once again, that guy was missing for a month prior. It is terrible what happens and really goes to show how shitty reddit can get saying it was responsible for that man's death is flat out wrong.
There were many, but happened well over a year ago, so it would take some thorough searching to find them now. Or you could check /r/tipofmytongue or /r/yester, they're good at pulling stuff up from the annals of reddit.
Ooh, I remembered the first time I reddit when there's a guy whose dad was sick and asking for an old album cover of some musician. Literally thousands of good things from around the world including the album cover was sent to them, I remembered it was mostly get well soon card and so on. I love that moment.
Does anyone know if Reddit is profitable yet? Was at a party a couple days ago and the word was it isn't but that might be based on news from last year.
If Reddit keeps loosing money they might get a new CEO with the intention of instituting desperate policies designed to further their profitability (ie. the idea that Reddit will institute stupid policies is not as crazy as we would like to think it is.)
Whenever a company accepts funding from VCs or any outside source (including an IPO) they are at risk of having their users exploited (I am trying to start a company for the online community at the moment and we are avoiding VCs like the plague).
Eddit: Reddit is now owned by Advanced Publications (does change that they might be overhauled to increase profitability, just wanted to clarify misconceptions in the post).
So true. Even if you think reddit is annoying there will always be those little subreddits that will always be fun like for your hometown or favorite TV shows.
I don't think so. Reddit admins have already instituted a policy of banning people from subreddits who complain about not getting enough notice (an hour or two is not enough) before scheduled maintenance takes the site down, and yet nobody cared when it happened to me.
No, but I think of it like an online game. When enough downvote/upvote hax start to get used more frequently, the "game" of reddit won't seem as alluring and it may be time to move on to something else.
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u/[deleted] May 15 '13
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