It used to be to reddit what reddit is to lemmy now, very broadly speaking. At least there was a great migration at some point because Digg got enshittified (perhaps one of the earliest examples of modern software enshittification)
Digg messed up and made a bunch of user-punishing changes and the entire internet all at once moved to Reddit, which was brand new, effectively killing Digg.
Digg has been the high example of what Reddit isn't, so we're all very confused whenever Reddit copies things Digg did that were universally hated.
It's basically the life cycle of the internet. A thing is created for the people, it's beautiful and loved, it is not profitable at all, they use their newfound user base to generate money, they abuse their user base to generate even more money, a new "for the people" alternative springs up, mass migration.
Skype, digg, and MySpace sort of followed that trend. Now reddit is completing the cycle. YouTube should be next, but it's significantly more expensive to make an alternative. But I remember when making money from YouTube was a south park punchline. Those were better days.
Don't forget that before Digg we were all on slashdot. Its like the cylons: What happened before will happen again. Or we're living in a horrible simulation.
Digg was reddit, and reddit was lemmy. This is back in like 08 or 09 i think. Reddit is only big because digg fucked up and everyone went there as the alternative
Notably, Digg updated which also involved a worse interface and didn't have an "old Reddit" interface you could access. Going to a site that was like the old interface involved leaving Digg and joining Reddit.
That is likely why you can now access older Reddit interfaces. They feel that many people will stay if they can find a way to use the new interface (and they may be right about that). The Digg approach of forcing all to use the new interface was a step over the line for Digg and Reddit likely fears a similar thing could happen to them.
I gave away something on Reddit recently and found out that DMs aren’t the same between new and old Reddit. I got a reply on old Reddit and thought was the only interested person and latter logging in on a different browser found more messages that I didn’t see on old. The messages from old didn’t show up on the new site as well. What a mess.
I’d generalize it as Reddit was for people who read the article, and Digg was for people who didn’t. There were other sites for different communities at the time as well like the Chive and their Bill Murray worship.
I went to Digg yesterday, it looks like the MSN start page full of terrible probably automatically generated articles. Shame reddit didn't have the same amount of people jump ship like when everyone left Digg 4.0.
Shame reddit didn’t have the same amount of people jump ship like when everyone left Digg
For me that would mostly be schadenfreude, people use all kinds of social media I am not at all involved with, and I've stopped caring about it.
The way Reddit is run is all about monetization and stock value now, I seriously doubt they can do anything to attract me again. But it's better that certain people stay over there IMO.
I've contributed to "Fedihosting Foundation .world group" and I'm considering monthly contribution, as I do use it on a daily basis.
Shame reddit didn’t have the same amount of people jump ship like when everyone left Digg 4.0.
I am predicting the same outcome but it will be much slower, reddit will "evolve" into a different kind of platform, with likely more emphasis on promoted content. The reason the "MSN home page" model is copied everywhere is because it generates money and requires far less involvement and maintainence. Reddit haaaaaates their community, they would be so, so happy if they could roll the whole thing back to before people could comment.
But they know that a lot of traffic comes from the engagement, so in order to better manage the community they are bringing in everyone's favorite new buzzword techbro solution to all problems... AI. They have partnered with Google on using Reddit as a training platform for next generation AI models so we will likely see more and more submissions from users who look like people and talk like people, but are actually tools for advertising and pushing agendas. It will be slow enough that the platform holds a strong number of users but it will decline as users flood to other new AI-driven platforms.
It's going to be AI slop all the way down, in all directions.
Dude I can't even run the website anymore. It lags, won't click links, can't even get into my settings. I thought I had malware but it was exclusive to every time I opened a reddit link.
I get lags too. Interestingly (and not relevant to the topic) I can access reddit okay (but it has huge pause on initial load) on Windows with Chrome (or Opera), but reddit fails to load correctly when I am using Linux with Chromium. Tried other browsers too, reddit seems to not like Linux at all (well my install of Linux anyway). I can't even log in successfully.
I'm not sure the old new one is that much better than the new new one tbh. I always found it to be bloated af, especially with time it got worse and worse. Also, why are both sites so slow?
I'm no html type code expert, but I do code a lot in other languages. I used f12 on a browser to look at what was going on, on the reddit sites and I have never seen such spaghetti code and layers upon layers of adjustments. I have no idea what they are using behind the scenes (php/js etc, again not my expertise) but it has to be an absolute shitshow.
On old old, and old new, I used to use an element picker in uBlock origin etc, to just remove all the bullshit that annoyed me. This actually sped things up! But its not perfect.
Oh this reminds me, if you are trying to get to new.reddit, for the old-new page, I had to delete all those elements as well, then goto new.reddit fresh and sign in. Then do the element pick again.
Still doesn’t fix the ill will from when they abruptly killed Apollo, in a stupid way that screwed both users and an indie dev who actually cared and had dedicated significant effort to the platform.
Also, I absolutely cannot wait for when Reddit itself becomes meme stocked. Somehow, both GameStop and AMC are still alive, but the crazies are back, and Reddit seems like an excellent candidate.
They don't care about ill will, they care about money. They made nothing from third party apps and millions from gutting the API and selling it to AI companies.
Oh, they're being cute with this. You need to pay money to get what reddit is calling "gold" (formerly known as coins), which you can use to give awards with. But one of the old awards you still can't give is the old-style reddit "gold" (premium). So they want ever more money without even giving the minor account boost you used to get, just for some skin for a comment. Fuck those guys.
Why have a thriving community when you can kill the nice and/or helpful ones with a lead pipe and then try to squeeze money out of the remaining morons?
Yeah, like the point wasn’t a “here’s how much i like it” it was “here’s a reward for providing such good content”. I would never give someone this, but old gold, maybe
While I’ve never given Reddit a penny, it was totally different back then. In those times, the site was much smaller, and buying gold got you r/lounge access and supported the site. They felt more community oriented and weren’t aggressively monetizing the service. Nowadays it’s like paying for Facebook or twitter, absolutely not.
Down to my bones I believe what happened to reddit was the plan all along. Yes back in the day there was more community that we made but it doesn't change the fact the dbags were, are, and will be steering the boat... that said my first guided comment felt dope and going to the lounge was fun.
It’s hard to say. I think it was obvious they planned to use ads and gold to break even, but it took many years to begin monetizing aggressively. Once new Reddit and the app came around, and they started making noise about an IPO, it became obvious.
Deleted my 15 year old account. I'm not going to let that weasel spez make $3 a year off my time. I hope something else can take over that is not for profit someday. A reddit like link sharer is important for the health of the Internet.
