Since I joined Reddit six months ago, I don’t know anything about Digg, so what happened?
It actually went very similarly to this. People didn’t want to leave Digg behind, and some tried to stick around with the “new” Digg v4.
There were different concerns at the time, however. I remember one of the big concerns was “power users” who managed to game the front page. People hated MrBabyMan, who was nearly every top post and basically spent all his time on the site, posting articles.
It will take time for a full changeover, and I’m not sure it will be quite the same. Digg had a lot of die-hard fans and they lost most of the userbase very quickly. reddit still has tons of people who are oblivious to what is going on and only have ever seen reddit through the official app or the new version of the site. They’ve nearly doubled their userbase since 2017, when they rolled out “new reddit” and there’s a significant chance they’re happy to lose the half of the userbase that is “old reddit.” The new users tend to be not be as discerning and don’t block ads.
Over time however, it will likely become a shell of its former self, much like going to MySpace years after the fact and seeing it as a weird ghost town shell of its former self. Maybe even like visiting Facebook or Twitter, now. Or even Yahoo!, which somehow is still lurching along despite being very unlike what it used to be. Technically even MySpace and Digg are still around in some form. They don’t really die as much as they just eke out an existence hanging on to a few users who somehow still put up with all the bullshit.
Exactly. Those of us here right now, and especially those of us that are staying on Lemmy after the dust settles will be just a first wave of the most hardcore, old-fashioned or dedicated users who wanted to use Reddit to its fullest extent. But we’re still a tiny minority.
One large subreddit has at least 10,000 active users at a time a lot of the time. Meanwhile, the largest Lemmy instance is about that size. We’re just the first batch to smell the nastiness coming from a distance and leave before it gets too bad.
Personally, I think future Reddit will just be a cheap Instagram or TikTok clone, where you have a lot of content catering to people in your region and the least common denominator.
MrBabyMan
Wow, what a trip down memory lane reading that name.
I gave up on Digg after the HD-DVD key fiasco and I think that was when reddit first started to gain momentum. Digg was headed down the crapper by that point already. I created my reddit account in April of 2007 which was about a month prior.
Those few years on reddit before Digg fully self-destructed were truly amazing. I think Lemmy will have that feeling for a while, but hopefully the federation system will allow for a self-healing effect when eternal September happens here.
Reddit can keep their new users. Maybe I’m just stereotyping here but I found it hard to have a discussion or argument with them. They seem to jump straight into insults and never reply back after a rebuttal. These are typically less than 2 year old accounts and then gets deleted shortly after.
Maybe this will actually as a kind of filter, and we’ll end up with an excellent community over here!
