[avgDev]

I'm done with reddit. My account is 12 years old with nearly 70k karma. I moderate a niche subreddit and have helped build a wealth of knowledge.

I will most likely deploy and pay for hosting a forum for the users and then nuke the subreddit.

This particular subreddit cannot just be replicated by anyone. Moderators are physicians, chemists and devs. We all worked for "free" for the greater good but I'm not going to contribute just for reddit to reap the rewards.

[yowzadave]

> We all worked for "free" for the greater good but I'm not going to contribute just for reddit to reap the rewards.

This is the thought I kept having when Steve Huffman was going on about the "valuable corpus of data" that Reddit owns and won't give away for free via the API.

The content may "belong" to Reddit, but Reddit certainly didn't create it--they convinced the rest of us to create it by building a website. They seem to have forgotten this, and by violating the unspoken contract with the actual creators, they are at risk of losing them entirely. Social media platforms are useless without creators.

[jfengel]

That unspoken contract is interesting. As I understand it, from Reddit's point of view, the contract was "We give you a place to a thing that you want to do, and will provide you storage space and bandwidth. In return, you give us the content you produce."

I imagine that this was, in fact, spoken -- in the terms of service. Not that anybody reads the terms of service (and I'm doubtful that any of them are really legally airtight).

It sounds as if users expected more, though I'm not sure what. Even as an unspoken contract, "free access forever" is a lot to ask. Those users can ditch Reddit, but I don't know if they'll find a (spoken) deal that's any better.

(Though I'm not sure why. Servers and bandwidth cost money, but not that much money.)

[alarm_hz]

The facade of platform capitalism continues to deteriorate(?)

Unfortunately Reddit is probably right that this will simply blow over eventually. Most people are entirely captured by platforms nowadays, used to the slurry of the algorithm and without much ability or drive to really leave the lazy river to either find content outside of that or create content outside of that.

[iamdbtoo]

> I will most likely deploy and pay for hosting a forum for the users and then nuke the subreddit.

This is a direction I would like to see things going. It could just be that I mostly frequent tech-oriented communities, but with "self-hosting" as a hobby growing the way it has and servers being much cheaper than they used to be, I think (hope?) a lot of communities will retreat from these places to ones where they have more control.

[avgDev]

This is also my hope.

I think 'slim' sites like HN really show that you do not need a lot of hardware to run a forum.

When you own a forum you can preserve the knowledge indefinitely, even if the forum is taken offline.

Reddit can close down your subreddit just because, they own it.

[castlecrasher2]

Subreddits like yours are the true loss here.

[babypuncher]

They are also the reason I think people stick around on Reddit.

Users show up for popular stuff like memes and videos. But they can get that anywhere. Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, etc. are all finely tuned infinite scrolling content machines. They stick around on Reddit because they find out that their "niche" interests have whole communitues of 20,000 other people there to talk about them.

Sadly this is also something I don't think many of the competitors can accurately reproduce in any kind of short timescale. It took over a decade for Reddit to build these organically, and they are really only sustainable because of the sheer size of Reddit's userbase. 20,000 users on a niche subreddit represents a microscopic fraction of Reddit's 430 million active users, so when you scale that down to an alternative with 2 million users (almost 20x Kbin's population) you end up with only a handful of users.

Some of these communities are going back to forums, but that isn't a real replacement either. A user subscribed to 5 niche subreddits no longer gets one place to see all their stuff, they have 5 separate forums they need to follow, and all the usability problems that come with them.

[safety1st]

The venerable sdf.org might be a good home for your community. It's a nonprofit that's been online since 1987 and hosts a variety of communities. Usage is mostly free. They recently launched a Lemmy instance where you could set up a "subreddit" with a couple of clicks - https://lemmy.sdf.org/

[pineconewarrior]

Likewise. I made all of my comment history into gibberish as well!

[enumjorge]

What subreddit is that?