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by memefrog 1101 days ago
How many people left Digg for Reddit all those years ago? If the same number left Reddit today, nobody would even notice. Digg was a very niche website. So was Reddit. The migration was large only relative to their then-tiny populations.

You could build a platform the size of early Reddit from people unhappy with these changes. You could probably build a platform 10x the size of early Reddit. Very likely larger than HN, certainly bigger than Lobste.rs or Tildes. But you aren't going to do to Reddit what Reddit did to Digg.
1 comments
thunderbong 1101 days ago
Where will they go? When people left Digg, Reddit was there. As of right now, there's no viable Reddit competitor.
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danjac 1101 days ago
Before Reddit, there were forums for every kind of interest. Reddit took care of the technical side of managing a forum, it was easier to stand up a subreddit for your fandom or hobby than purchasing a domain, setting up whatever PHP forum software, database and so on.

If all those things were easier - maybe dirt-cheap turnkey hosting for something federated like Lemmy or whatever - then perhaps the answer to "viable Reddit competitor" is no Reddit at all, but just each subreddit go off and do its own thing. Your stamp-collecting forum doesn't need Reddit scale, it just needs a donate button for a few bucks a month, and if it's connected to the Fediverse then people can use a single login or app to switch between all their forums like they do with subreddits with a single federated timeline/notifications to keep them posted.

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memefrog 1101 days ago
To be fair there is dirt-cheap turnkey hosting of things like web forums. Remember those cPanel webhosts where you'd pay $5/month or something and then you'd be given a list of PHP programs you could host. Or there were those various free forum hosts that would only start charging over a certain margin of traffic. Some would even let you use your own domain name without paying for the hosting, but I think most kept use of your own domain name as a premium feature.

You could set up a phpBB forum or something like that almost for free on one of the cheap DIY webhosts like nearlyfreespeech, but you'd need to take the time to install. It would still be pretty easy though.

These things still exist. But people will switch to Discord instead because most subreddits seem to have discords already.

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