[db0] Reddit is a dead site running

dbzer0.com Reddit is a dead site running

Yesterday I read the excellent article by Cory Doctorow: Let the Platforms Burn and this particular anecdote The thing is, network effects are a double-edged sword. People join a service to be with the people they care about. But when the people they care about start to leave, everyone rushes for th...

The link contains db0's views on the ongoing state of Reddit, and I think that it's worth sharing here - both to document a piece of opinion, and as food for thought. The main points are:

a comparison between the current state of Reddit vs. Myspace near collapse;
the illusion that everything is fine based on "raw" numbers like engagement;
that Reddit was never a "good" site, but it had two positive points (open API and hands-off approach to communities), destroyed by the current events;
the ongoing progression of the Fediverse as alternative to Reddit;
the change in quality in both the content and the behaviour of the people still there.

The text mentions an article from Cory Doctorow. I've copied it to a pastebin, in case someone can't access it.

EDIT: I hope that the author doesn't mind, but I'll copy the contents of the article inside the spoilers below. Hopefully for mobile users it'll be a bit more accessible.

Reddit Migration @kbin.social

Reddit is a dead site running

dbzer0.com /blog/reddit-is-a-dead-site-running/

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/0 @lemmy.dbzer0.com

Reddit is a dead site running

dbzer0.com /blog/reddit-is-a-dead-site-running/

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146 comments

I was on reddit much longer than myspace and I still miss myspace more than reddit. lemmy definitely reminds me of the early days of many social network sites. reddit was just noisy programers faking users at the beginning.....so perhaps we do that with our content again... I wonder if I spin up a lemmy instance If I can have midi playing on my page again?
- Just as an FYI, MIDI does not make any sound; it's just data containing pitch and velocity information (among other things). Virtual instruments use midi information to make the sounds. Windows (and I assume other OSs) have default virtual instruments that make the sounds that you would hear when playing a midi file, but that would sound different playing the same file through other virtual instruments. It's a pretty common misconception.
  On the other hand, don't you dare try to bring back music autoplaying when you load a page from the myspace era!
  
  don’t you dare try to bring back music autoplaying when you load a page from the myspace era!
  You can't have a good site without .mid files! Or without
  <blink>
  blinking text
  </blink>
  !
  
  undefined
  
  <img src="work.gif"> <marquee><strong>UNDER CONSTRUCTION</strong></marquee> <img src="work.gif">
  
  Wow, what a trip to the past!
  Trying to figure out how my friend has a webpage at geocities.com/supercool and I have to have geocities.com/superawesome/superawesome.html
  
  I'm not seeing any font tags, sonny. You can't have a real web page without <FONT FACE="Verdana" SIZE="3" COLOR="red">Welcome!</FONT>
  
  Didn't the inventor of the html blink markup apologize for creating it?
  
  Or dancing baby icons. If it's good enough for Homer J. Simpson, it's good enough for you.
  
  I finally understood midi by comparing it with emojis. The unicode standard only defines characters and their meanings, but it's up to os or app developers to choose an actual visual representation to display.
  
  Another anology would be sheet music.
  
  Most pages block audio autoplay anyway, but you can always turn it off ;)
  
  On the other hand, don’t you dare try to bring back music autoplaying when you load a page from the myspace era!
  Yes midi, I literally want a player piano to start up on anyones random page but especially my own! ⁂
  
  You can import basically any midi file in Guitar Pro and it’ll output a guitar tab
  
  For sure; at that point it's not even doing anything except formatting the data basically. If it's a good program it might try to arrange things so that fingering is more efficient.
  
  Similar to platform emojis being unique interpretations of the same information.
- I feel like people had a stronger emotional attachment to Myspace than they have to modern social media. It was more like blogs (people were also fond of their own blogs, even bad ones). That's perhaps even worse for Reddit because the "emotional cost of switch" is far smaller.
  I wonder if I spin up a lemmy instance If I can have midi playing on my page again?
  It's probably doable, but odds are that you'd need to tweak Lemmy's code for that.
  
  no, it was that they were teenagers when they were using it. it's pure nostalgia.
  
  Yet I have zero nostalgia for Facebook.
  
  I was almost 30 when I was on MySpace and I still loved it.
  
  Perhaps this plays a role too, but I think that it's more about its personal nature.
  
  I might be an outlier, but I have zero nostalgia for my pretentious teenage emo-edgelord Myspace page - and I am glad it is lost to the graveyard of history

146 comments