| > Digg losing to Reddit are over I strongly disagree and I can give you a clear reason why. Internet forum / niche communities serve a few purposes, and the advent AI (I know, bear with me) destroys their existing moat. A reddit serves the following purposes: 1. Persistent store of timeless information - ChatGPT style models have made this redundant. I 2. Updated store of current information - The problem with current information, is that it's generated where the users are. It is a chicken and egg problem, but that's exactly what makes it so dangerous. It takes 1 viral moment for people to pull off a critical mass of exodus, and you're never getting your users back. Like a siphon that will keep draining until your reservoir is fully empty. 3. fully realized niche hang-out spot - 20% of people create 80% of content. The 20% are embedded deeply enough in internet culture, that they can make a consensus move to another platform, and the other 80% will follow. (only applies to niche hobbies) 4. 9gag replacement - This is easy to disrupt and has been disrupted many times before. Reddit itself has already destroyed any sense of uniqueness that its platform had. No meme platform has managed to stay cool for more than 1 generational cycle. Reddit will be no different. Previous reddit exoduses didn't work, because it involved banning a certain extremist/morally dubious communities. The alternatives were terrible, unmoderated and struggled to migrate the timeless information over. The next exodus will be normal users. Timeless information migration has already been completed by ChatGPT. My favorite subreddit has already migrated to a 3rd party website. Moderation is a lot easier with LLMs. The last remaining piece of the puzzle is for a semi-competent new competitor to show up. Let's see if it actually happens. |
This was only possible because ChatGPT-style models were trained on data scraped from Reddit using the (then) free API. While it may seem like bolting the barn door after the horse has run out, Reddit can ignore this and become obsoleted by models that keep ingesting the latest user comments, or at least earn some money out of it.