this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Very well put. I'd like to add, that it's actually a good thing that the fediverse is "fragmented" because then the power vacuum that happened on reddit can't easily happen here.
That's an upside, but it's not necessarily a "good" thing to be fragmented if it means you don't have the network effects to make a satisfying community.
End of the day a lot of Reddit's value came from its popularity.
Hard disagree.
Tiktok is popular. Its hold very little value to lots of people though. Same thing with twitter.
For me, reddits value was from its popularity amongst a certain demographic, which was largely the techies. At this point enough techies have come over to the fediverse that so far its meeting or exceeding the reddit itch.
Id rather a community of 10,000 people who are mostly tech driven than a community of 10,000,000 with 10,000 techy types. Popular reddit posts had thousands of the same played out comments and comment chains languishing at the bottom of threads. Popular threads on the fediverse so far have people engaging in conversation without a collapsed thread of 4000 ignored posts at the bottom.
Popularity means nothing when its mostly people with nothing worthwhile to say except the same played out jokes and memes
I agree wholeheartedly with this. Recently, I was subbed to overlapping sources on kbin and Lemmy and I realized I had to cut the fat. I see similar posts covering the same event in multiple places, but I'm not going to seriously engage in all of them.
Basically, I don't need to find the biggest one that has everything on it or create one mega aggregate, I just need to find the right place for me. Some people seem to want to be plugged into this 1 big nexus of every permutation of a topic, but I don't see a reason for it.
If you extend that thinking out to the internet as a whole, you'd need to be part of these forums and this subreddit and this Facebook group and these discords or you're gonna miss out on something. But most of it is just noise at a certain point.
Value to who? Not to me. I saw subs I liked nosedive because of popularity. I saw the network effect force me to unsubscribe and search elsewhere.
I can even give you an estimate of the number of subscribers required to kill a sub, between 70k and 300k, depending on the theme of the sub. This is when the peanut gallery joins in and the spectators become the showrunners.
But value to the shareholders? Sure! More people, more ad revenues.
There's a sweet spot. A dead forum is of no use to anyone. Reddit had a good few years where there were enough users to have a good exchange of information, and not a sea of low effort posts. I think it all changed when they started advertising their app and "new reddit" on Facebook.
Well, define "dead", because in your terms beehaw/lemmy is dead and still everyone wants to be a part of it.
People need to fight this fear of missing out. There are people here who suggest that we should run bots to mirror reddit. That would be a disaster.
Huh? No, I'd say the opposite, the fediverse is in the sweet spot right now.
Ugh, yes, it's unfortunate that popularity ruined so many subs. We've all watched a tonne of them turn into generic repost mills over the years.