[yadingus]

It works for what?

Take a step back. What is social media achieving in its current state. If you only look at the shiny cat videos and dances and memes, that's not the purpose. The purpose is the mass collection of data.

If your only standard of "is working" is "it's what the majority uses", then yes, "it works". But do you really want that to be your standard? Just number of users, at any cost?

If you're competing against algorithms fine tuned to make people pretty much addicted, do you really want to play the same game? And is this mindset not fueled by ideology as well?

[nullityrofl]

If you think Reddit is social media in the same sense that Facebook is then I think we're coming at this from very difficult angles.

Reddit is more akin to Wikipedia than it is to Facebook at this point for many people. Yes, much of the popularity comes from interacting with others but it's also become a hive of up-to-date information and opinions for hobbies, for trades, etc.

If I start a new hobby I don't need to go find the 10 year old abandoned page or the SEO manipulated AI generated summary. I just go to /r/hobby. New espresso machine? /r/espresso. I want to know what 3d printer to buy? /r/3dprinters. Damage to my roof? /r/roofing. I don't know how to do some maintenance on my house? /r/homeowners. I need to buy a new car but I don't know how to get a good deal? /r/askcarsales.

There's a lot more at play here than the stale "social media bad, algorithms manipulate society" take.

[kaba0]

I would say that reddit’s value is simply being a mostly text-based forum with a big user base, good model for discussions and good moderation (as in, it efficiently removes spam. Surely several mods are very problematic in their power grabs).

I hate facebook with a burning passion, but on “ultra niche groups” front it can actually be surprisingly good. What most big social media networks lack though is the very simple upvote-downvote mechanics, and proper comment trees. That enables reddit (and Hn also) to have truly great discussions from time to time. Facebook instead optimizes for rage by showing the shittiest possible take at front and no amount of explanation could de”platform” a low effort take under a news article for example.

While reddit is not immune to that, you will often find a great comment chain within the top 3 ones that calls out the stupid takes and actually has proper factual knowledge.