The IT Nerd

The API protests and Reddit’s heavy handed reaction to said protests are getting a lot of attention. And as far as I am concerned, Reddit is doomed as a result of that. I’ve been saying that for a while and I am sticking to that because from where I sit, this Reddit situation a case of is history repeating itself.

For those of a certain age who were using the Internet in the early 2000’s, one of the best places to go on the Internet was digg. Wikipedia describes Digg like this:

Digg, stylized in lowercase as digg, is an American news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select stories specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral Internet issues. It was launched in its current form on July 31, 2012, with support for sharing content to other social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.

It formerly had been a popular social news website, allowing people to vote web content up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. In 2012, Quantcast estimated Digg’s monthly U.S. unique visits at 3.8 million. Digg’s popularity prompted the creation of similar sites such as Reddit.

In short, it digg was Reddit before Reddit even existed. But much like Reddit, management who figured that digg was immune to failure made a mistake that killed the site. Again, from Wikipedia:

Digg’s v4 release on August 25, 2010, was marred by site-wide bugs and glitches. Digg users reacted with hostile verbal opposition. Beyond the release, Digg faced problems due to so-called “power users” who would manipulate the article recommendation features to only support one another’s postings, flooding the site with articles only from these users and making it impossible to have genuine content from non-power users appear on the front page. Frustrations with the system led to dwindling web traffic, exacerbated by heavy competition from Facebook, whose like buttons started to appear on websites next to Digg’s.

In short, they took the ability for ordinary users of digg to upvote or downvote web content out of the users hands and put it into the hand of a few. On top of that, the site became buggy. That started the downward spiral that eventually led to the demise of digg. Yes digg did try to fix a lot of this stuff. But by the time they did, it was too little too late.

Now let’s compare that to Reddit, Steve Huffman who is Reddit’s CEO is trying to make money from Reddit at the expense of their user base. Specifically he’s ignoring its users, alienating the volunteers it depends on for literally everything, and killing third-party apps which work better than the first party Reddit app. Not to mention he’s ignoring the threat of subreddits moving to places other than Reddit such as Beehaw which will take traffic away from Reddit. In a way, Reddit is following down the same path as digg. And what is ironic about this situation is that Reddit was one of the sites who actively added to the factors that led to their demise:

Disgruntled users declared a “quit Digg day” on August 30, 2010, and used Digg’s own auto-submit feature to fill the front page with content from Reddit. Reddit also temporarily added the Digg shovel to their logo to welcome fleeing Digg users.

And now Reddit is on its way to becoming the next digg.

Can Reddit stop itself from becoming the next digg? Sure it can. All it needs to do is to have a CEO who will listen to users, respect them and change course accordingly. But Steve Huffman isn’t that CEO. So I’m not holding my breath in terms of seeing Reddit change course. And I expect that Reddit will join Digg, not to mention other sites like MySpace, and LiveJournal as being footnotes in Internet history as a result.

This entry was posted on June 25, 2023 at 8:35 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Reddit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.