Considering that Reddit's own popularity was boosted by Digg's collapse due to unpopular changes and dysfunction, you'd think that Reddit would be more aware of the risks of pursuing an antagonistic relationship with their users.
The problem is that such an open-ended prediction has absolutely no value whatsoever...
I'm sure Reddit will die someday, but people have been saying this for at least 10 years or more. When non-technical users started using it, when violentacrez et al were banned, with every layout change big or small, staff changes...
People said the same thing about Facebook when it opened to non-edu users or when it launched the timeline. Or when Apple is antagonistic towards developers.
Reddit, Facebook, Apple and other companies are able to do well by antagonizing niche users because niche users can be replaced by regular folk. And sometimes it's almost necessary to antagonize those early users, since they can be a barrier to growth.
Reddit wants to dissociate themselves from 4chan, t_d, Boston Bomber and all this stuff. And they're doing it via cat pictures and the sort.
The value is in knowing they always have to watch their toes because it can all be over in a heartbeat. There is a very fine line between domination and irrelevance.
Digg, MySpace and Friendster weren't "over in a heartbeat". It took decay and lack of care with the platform, plus strong competition with strong venture capital funding. Plus, they were never as dominant or as entrenched as Reddit is.
Reddit is not going away just because you dislike it.
As I remember it, what happened on Digg was that there was a kind of friendly rivalry between Reddit and Digg. So everybody on Digg was already aware of Reddit. Then when the redesign hit, a meme spread that "This redesign sucks, try reddit". And so people did. And what they found was a much better community (Digg was more like a news website with a comment section).
The cautionary tail for Reddit is that what keeps people locked into a social network is community. And if they replace community with cat pictures, the whole thing will fall apart.
Yep. Also, what Digg did wasn't just a redesign, but also a complete rewrite from scratch in the exact way Joel Spolsky told everyone not to do one decade before [1]. It was buggy and missing important community features, and it was incompatible with the old website because they had changed the whole database too, so there was no way of choosing between old and new running side by side like you can with Reddit.
Reddit is very much a nest of hate, if you are any stripe of conservative.
"The Donald" was censored, then banned, for speech less heinous, in lesser amounts, and with lower, or often negative, voting scores, than is currently allowed on the site now (by those with approved political beliefs, of course).
Those with non-approved beliefs find themselves silenced and censored by moderators and admins, while those who instigated their silencing are left unmolested.
Subreddits with thousands (or in the case of "The Donald", HUNDREDS of thousands) of members are banned for the actions of a very, very few. In some such cases, those few were outside instigators (Reddit calls them "brigaders") from subreddits with opposing views; purposefully posting inflammatory material under sockpuppet accounts. The "brigaders" then report the naughty speech to the admins.
Doesn't take many such reports to have all those thousands of voices silenced. Of course this tends to go one way. Although "brigading" is ostensibly against Reddit rules, subreddits with approved views are allowed to do it openly, although some do in private.
And lest we forget, the CEO of Reddit HIMSELF has hacked into user accounts of those with unapproved views, and posted inflammatory things posing AS them (an act which Redditors were assured was not possible). Supposedly he's only done it a few times, but how are Redditors to know for sure?
When all these activities on the part of Reddit's leadership go one way, and are directed specifically against one political persuasion, it becomes very clear that Reddit IS a nest of hate, and that's the way they like it. It is also clear that they censor not to stop "hate" but to cease the discussion and meme production of conservatives, to which they partially attribute Trump's 2016 victory.
To this end, they've recently gone so far as to announce that they will censure users for merely VOTING on unapproved topics. Sure, they say those unapproved topics are "hate", but when the people defining "hate" are so slimy as to hack into and pose as their own users to sow discord, or to tacitly approve one way "brigades", one need not wonder their actual purposes.
Like so many of their brethren in the media who took it personally when Hillary lost, they are taking drastic action to be sure that such free speech activities not continue if there is any possibility of a repeat of 2016.
