Isn’t Reddit - like Twitter - too big to fail now?
Just like people have been frantically looking for alternatives for Twitter - like Mastodon - they quickly find that the winner-takes-all effect that made Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok and Reddit so large is that everybody is there and not on their brand new alternative.
In the past, social networks have failed, think MySpace. But they never failed only over management decisions (they failed primarily because they didn’t adapt quickly enough). And that’s what Reddit is doing: it’s adapting. I believe that Reddit had the guts to take these steps because they saw that Twitter got away with it.
Yesterday someone presented their Reddit alternative on Hacker News and the top comment struck me the most:
Congrats on the hard work, and the idea is fine, but the problem is that tech like this is a cheap commodity in a massively oversaturated space, and without a hook that makes the platform exceptional (innovative/clever/beautiful design, unique aggregation features, inherently interesting content, reimagined user/content/moderation dynamics etc etc), this kind of thing is dead in the water because it lacks a network effect.
If there’s one thing that forums are lacking, it’s a network effect. In the past 10 years I have seen Discourse be more and more suitable as a B2C or B2B communication platform, and it’s fantastic for that. But all the hobbyist people that don’t care about owning their data are on Facebook, Reddit or Discord. They get the tech for free and the people they target already have an account.
There isn’t even a barrier or need to run your own infrastructure. You can get managed hosting with us or with CDCK and there’s not a byte you need to touch. The barrier that’s there is that you need to market your forum. You need to get people to sign up and come back.