The last major holdouts in the protest against Reddit’s API pricing relented, abandoning the so-called “John Oliver rules” which only allowed posts featuring the TV host. It's the official end of the battle. The Reddit protest is over, and Reddit won.
“‘The Hangover Is Over; Smooth Sailing From Here!’ Declares Habitual Drinker, Popping Open Another Bottle In Celebration”.
Did Digg die in days?
Man…it’s been years, so I don’t remember, but honestly it felt like it at the time. Everyone hated their massive V4 redesign, so people just…left. The Reddit situation is different, because it only really affected third-party app users, not every single user of the site.
Edit: I looked it up, and yeah, there was a “quit Digg day” on August 30, 2010 when pretty much everybody just left for Reddit and didn’t look back. It helped that people actively bombed Digg’s front page with links to Reddit that day, letting people know where to go. Two days later Digg’s CEO was ousted by the board, two months later they laid off 37% of their staff. They basically died overnight. That’s not happening to Reddit.
It’s worth noting that Reddit has been around a lot longer than Digg had at the time, and has way more traffic than Digg ever did. Unseating Reddit is going to be a lot harder than quitting Digg was.
reddit will also have subreddits that will be fine with very few power users.
sport and politics/news subs will live for a long time for example, content is generated every day, just need to post it.
Also it’s worth noting that when Digg died, at that year there’s no mobile app to use, so the og reddit design doesn’t hinder the transition. On the other hand, when people switch from reddit mobile app to Lemmy browser UI, it just too different and hard to get used to, so people went back to reddit. The wave happened before there’s a comparable app available, the people using Digg back then is so different than the people using Reddit today.
For those of us who made the Bigg Digg Exodus, it sure felt like it. Same with those who left reddit when the Apollo dev shed light on the bullshit. It’s dead to us who left and will forever only live on for us as an SEO zombie.
I think we all underestimate how much smaller the internet was back then. Flickr, the premier photo sharing site back in the day, was acquired by yahoo for $25MM. Kevin rose of digg was famously on the cover of business week touting a $60MM valuation. In todays big business tech era those are small numbers even factoring for inflation.
Basically back then users were counted in millions and if the let’s say 5-10K power users and a 100k randos moved on that could kill a service. Today Reddit is too big to fail. It would take tens of millions of users in a mass exodus to make a dent.
Look at Twitter right now, which is about the fastest case of enshittification of the modern era. The weird trolls filled the power vacuum that proper power users left and it’s still plugging along. If something like this eventually happens to Reddit it’ll be more like Facebook, a very slow decline but even in its shell state boasting hundreds of millions of users.
Wow, that cover photo gave me nostalgia, and I wasn’t even young in 2006. Already seems like a distant era.
I think Reddit and Twitter will just become garbage, zombie platforms like Yahoo - still around but basically irrelevant. We’ll see. I was an avid Redditor and quit about two months ago. Honestly I don’t miss it at all. It had already become garbage before the whole blow-up.
Facebook didn’t die because it also house businesses(pages, marketing, etc), influencer(which in turn support businesses), and there’s marketplace that work well enough to support the platform.
Even though i’ve left fb, i still keep the account, because my family still use it, and i will occasionally open the app and see their update(after scrolling past 10 sponsored post and 20 suggested post). The consequence of leaving fb is me drifting apart from my friend. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Depends on what dead means. Digg is still around.
I’d rather ask the question; how many weekly active users have Reddit lost in the past two months. It will likely take months until we know.