This article is on Medium, which has a paywall. I’m a member, but not logged in. I was able to read it so it may depend on how many times you’ve read Medium articles.
One point he made that I found interesting was:
So, in light of all of this, should Reddit even exist? Is there really a point to a web forum in 2023? Aren’t we past all that?
He thinks we are. I never thought about it before. Maybe in the case of some Reddit subreddits and other forums, but I don’t think so in general. I’ve got a lot great information from forums.
Nothing against OP, but man, this is a rough one. This is nothing more than an opinion piece with bad takes.
What a bullshit article. I’ve highlighted some of it below:
Forums became uninteresting because I was looking for more structured forms of online publishing
Forums are pretty structured. Twitter and the new reddit are way less structured unless you’re talking about structured with ads built in. That aside, that’s a personal preference not a fact of the internet.
it’s just as uncool as Twitter’s Elon suddenly asking precious dollhairs for API access
if you use “dollhairs” in an actual publication you’re going to find it hard to be taken seriously.
As a product owner, all you have to do is try them all, and make a list of all their features to know what Reddit misses. And can you really blame them doing just that, especially in a pre-IPO state? After all, investors will invest in Reddit, not 3rd-party apps piggybacking on its APIs.
They should have built out the feature set and had a good usable app before making the decision then. It was a dumb decision, full stop. Re-reading this it makes even less sense. Who is blaming them for researching 3rd party apps? And, OF COURSE, the investors are investing in reddit. That’s why they should have a usable app of their OWN before dropping the ball like this.
While admittedly, good design alone doesn’t improve much the valuation of a product, good design can distract from bigger issues and helps prevent users from flocking to 3rd-party offerings
Good design absolutely adds to the valuation. Like, what? If an app performs as badly as the native app to the point people have no choice but to use 3rd party apps for basic things like, I don’t know, MODERATION, you need a drastic overhaul before shutting out those 3rd party apps.
For starters, subreddits going dark — aka making everyone else’s content go private without their consent — could be considered content theft. Imagine, for instance, a Medium publication unpublishing all your articles because their owners suddenly disagree with Tony Stubblebine. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t land well. The same applies here. Many Reddit users find themselves having to side with either Reddit or some small 3rd-party app developer. Pragmatically speaking, a large majority of them will side with the platform owners because ultimately those apps are nothing without Reddit and its API. Going back to Medium as an example, when the Medium Partner Program was introduced, some big publications reacted very similarly, got angry, grabbed their toys and left trying to take with them all their writers. Except it didn’t work, because people ultimately wanted the platform and its reach, which was already proven, as is Reddit’s.
I stopped reading it here. They lost me at this point. The author of this is either playing to reddit’s side, has no idea of what’s driving the current situation, or a mix of the two. There’s no way someone that actually wrote an article about this, and actually researched it, would come away with this take. Comparing a paid service, like Medium, deleting the articles and things you have paid to access is vastly different than shutting down an established forum(subreddit), that voted do so, that was free of charge the entire time. I know they have paid subscriptions and their dumb NFT stuff, gotta pay the bills somehow, but that was such a brain dead take I had to stop.
I haven’t read many Medium articles but if they’re all this low of effort I don’t feel I’ve missed out on much.
edit:
Many Reddit users find themselves having to side with either Reddit or some small 3rd-party app developer. Pragmatically speaking, a large majority of them will side with the platform owners because ultimately those apps are nothing without Reddit and its API.
This part is the part that made me truly stop reading. I could imagine spez writing this himself.
Forums are pretty structured. Twitter and the new reddit are way less structured unless you’re talking about structured with ads built in. That aside, that’s a personal preference not a fact of the internet.
Yeah, when it comes to technical help a forum I found to be much more helpful, since relevant threads just don’t die. When someone comments it gets bumped up increasing the visibility that some helpful person will see it and respond whereas on reddit/lemmy/kbin/etc types posts as a community gets bigger is pretty much dead and talking into the void after sometimes a couple of hours later. So that encourages having to post again leading to more reposting. It’s just a much more quick rapid and temporary form of discussion. When you respond to someone those more modern takes on message boards the only one who’ll see it is the person you responded to.
Forums by their nature don’t need constant rapid activity of chats. Even on lemmy now as the activity has started to grow some posts are starting to reach the point that nobody will ever go back and read them as new content comes out. Compared to the beginnings where even week old posts people would comment on due to being visible. There’s a place for both traditional forums and rapid modern post based message board experiences.
I’m on kbin and haven’t figured out/noticed getting notifications for replies to my comments. I’ve been leaving the thread open in a tab and refreshing every so often. Does kbin do notifications and I’m just missing it?
Once you hang around the fediverse long enough you’ll get used to the media being full of trashy the takes on social media.
Bottom line is that there’s a bit of a shake up or fracturing, and the average media talking head isn’t qualified to be insightful about it other than some basic vague feeling that a lack of stability in the structure of mass media is frustrating to them.
I’ve figured that the average media person’s mentality is geared toward mass distribution which conflicts entirely with the fediverse which is about diversity, choice, non-capitalistic work and freedom, and so they either don’t get it or have an interest in it failing, which really just reveals how much mass media is probably a bunch of big-corp bootlickers.
the average media person’s mentality is geared toward mass distribution
Even this ‘writers’ take is that their path was to move away from community and threaded conversations into monologues.
The guy is a self important twit full of bad takes
No joke.
The whole “Yeah i went to a platform where people couldn’t argue with me as easily and i didn’t have to face any criticism or being wrong. It’s far better this way” schtick was really obvious by the end of it, and super gross to have read all the way through that “Objective and unbaised” slog of very biased ramblings.
This part is the part that made me truly stop reading. I could imagine spez writing this himself.
This is exactly how i felt by the end
“Objective and unbiased” my ass
I don’t get the medium critic either. If medium paid someone for their content, sure, they should have the right to host it even the writer now disagrees with them, but if they a platform and sharing some profits or no profits with the creator, pound sand, they absolutly get to hold their content hostage. They have every right to move their free work or stop sharing their free work where ever they feel like.
Reddit is one of the most valuable websites on the entire internet. It’s being miss-managed, and therefore it either needs new management or it needs to be replaced by something else.
The reddit community has tried to get new management put in place and seems to be failing, so plan B is to replace Reddit with something else.
I don’t think just “getting rid” of reddit is an option at all. It needs to be replaced with something better. And that something is not Medium.
Reddit is one of the most valuable websites on the entire internet. It’s being miss-managed,
Understanding why those 2 points matter is important:
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Users are pumping the site full of free content willingly
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A subset of those same users are moderating that content for free & others are creating tools and apps to make interaction with the bare framework a better user experience
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The management know it’s a goldmine but are clueless in how to monetize it fully
Point 1 was how sites like Facebook and Twitter became huge and made billions off selling that data and the data points generated
Point 2 is how they fell down because they didn’t understand that they were content moderation businesses but failed to invest in that or use the Reddit model of getting users to moderate it themselves
Point 3 is what will cause Reddit to either collapse or die a slow death when the majority of its user base begin to realise they are producing and curating content for free and for a team that holds them in contempt.
A lot of users want to leave because they see that contempt but don’t get that they are still willing to offer their labour to others for free if they would just build a new playground for them. And not even a fully featured one because Reddits framework is a rickety piece of shit. Just enough of one for them to decorate themselves with 3rd party tools, which is basically what they did with MySpace.
[Edit to add] Extended point 2 which underlines the point that Reddit is very much like MySpace in that the users are shaping their experience of the site, not the other way round
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It’s not just about the information though, is it? Web forums can offer a sense of community that his preferred alternative (long-form Medium articles with comments) just can’t match, in my experience.
I’m of the “old fart” variety that recalls the days of IRC and totally agree. Back even before forums those communities run off servers in peoples basements were a treasure trove of knowledge and community. I have very fond memory of making real connections with people there. As you pointed out, that simply doesn’t exist on an article with comments.
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I am hopeful that the lack of “karma” feedback to posters in Lemmy/Kbin will dampen the farming that goes on over at Reddit, and that posts are about contributing ideas or whatever content is expected in order to be a part of the community, rather than trying to get “upvotes.”
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What is so much better about forums compared to social media is forums are community and topic focused. Twitter and the rest are personality look at me focused. I much prefer forums then a bunch of arm waving attention seekers.
Truly terrible.
Reddit is a problem because they shit on the community, not because blogspam is somehow a better format.
Forums are the best thing about the internet. It’s where like-minded people can talk without being interrupted by “suggested posts” and crap like that. Unless you’re on Reddit.
This guy likes to hear himself talk, which is what Medium is good for. Reddit is for hearing others try to tell you you’re wrong.
Simple logical fallacy. I’m not into forums so you should not be.
I can’t have every conversation in my community and not all things I find interesting can exist outside of niche web communities.
Reddit provided easy access to many small areas all in one site with one general set of rules.
Hopefully lemmy will end up similar even without single organized owner.
Forums are very useful for fostering discussion of gaining information. Especially in sectors like tech. As for other types of discussion, well…it can get toxic.
I think kbin has an opportunity to address the toxicity. The anonymous nature of Reddit really lends itself to faceless road rage culture where people feel safe behind their keyboard. If kbin can really push itself as a Mastodon + Reddit platform where everyone has social connections, then maybe it takes away some of that anonymous feeling.
I’m here for anonymity and it was one of the first things I loved about reddit.
I too am here for anonymity. I signed up with lemmy because it didn’t even require an email address so I didn’t need to go through the process of generating a throw away like kbin does. I like that I could just have discussions with users without knowing anything about them and it only being a topic of interest that brought about the conversation. Then departing from the conversation not remembering who the user was aside from the nice discussion.
In case it’s paywalled for others I’ll quote the whole section:
The bigger question: should Reddit even exist?
So, in light of all of this, should Reddit even exist? Is there really a point to a web forum in 2023? Aren’t we past all that? I guess it depends on who you ask. I certainly am. The last forum I frequented was Macrumors’, and I left for two reasons.
- Forums are struggling with GDPR and my legal right to be forgotten. On the one hand, I understand that deleting parts of conversations when users want to leave, renders the threads quite unreadable. On the other hand, however, content is owned by the person who posted it (that’s true for Reddit as well, last time I checked), so I should have the right to leave a forum and take my content with me.
- I realised I was wasting time writing long, elaborate replies on technology threads instead of posting them here on Medium, as stories. Somehow, for me, a platform where people write articles then discuss in the comments, makes a lot more sense than what forums can offer. But I’m sure not everyone is like me, or thinks like me.
That doesn’t necessarily mean though that there isn’t still a genuine place for sites like Reddit in the modern world. Having online communities is certainly good, though we seem to be heading towards a monetised content model where even a tweet can generate pennies or dollars. On the one hand, I’m not against it when the content is good, on the other, it does beg the question, how are forums like Reddit supposed to stay alive in a world where advertisement isn’t necessarily a very lucrative model?
I guess I find myself less up in arms against Reddit and its potentially misguided attempt at getting a good IPO valuation, than most of its users and critics. Many of those throwing stones never owned or ran a company, and while Reddit’s CEO does come off as arrogant, it’s a trap easy to fall into when your site has a daily 52 million users. Many CEOs also tend to have a bit of a God complex. I guess it comes with the territory?
Steve Huffman does have a point, though. This will blow over one way or another. The question is, what’s left in its wake?
He does at least put the caveat of “it depends on who you ask” on it, but both of those bullet points he raises strike me as very ill-thought-out.
The first bit about GDPR and the “right to be forgotten” is kind of interesting in the wake of Reddit restoring deleted comments, but I’m not sure that this is actually a GDPR problem. As far as I’m aware the “right to be forgotten” means that the site has to delete anything it’s stored that’s personally identifying, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it has to delete literally everything you’ve ever written. When someone deletes their account and you scrub their username off of the comments they left it seems to me that this would suffice (note: not a lawyer by any means, I’d welcome a response from someone more familiar with that).
The second bullet point… huh? “a platform where people write articles then discuss in the comments” is literally a forum, is it not? How is it not a forum? He’s saying that he was wasting time writing in forums when he could be writing in forums instead. I don’t get it. I guess he’s saying he prefers to write the initial entry of the thread rather than one of the responses? Seems like a pointless distinction to me.
His question as to how a forum is supposed to stay alive when advertisement isn’t very lucrative also doesn’t really mean anything. There are plenty of businesses that stay alive without a “lucrative” income stream, all you need to do is operate within the means provided by your non-lucrative income stream. For something like Reddit that means don’t spend huge amounts of dollars supporting buggy video hosting when you don’t need to, don’t waste your programmers’ resources developing features your users don’t want, and so forth. Hosting a simple text forum should not be all that costly, even on a scale as big as Reddit, and there’s plenty of ways to monetize the fact that you’ve got all that data and all that user attention coming your way. Reddit seems to have consistently made poor decisions in this regard. That’s Reddit’s problem, not a problem with fora in general.
We’ll see with the Fediverse, I guess. If collectively a bunch of hobbyists can provide the resources needed to keep all of this running out of pocket or based off of whatever advertising and donations they can scrape together then Reddit could have too.
Anyone that says we’re “past” the days of forums, Reddit, Lemmy, etc. has an incredibly myopic view of what those really constitute.
It’s been mentioned the communities, but the problem solving and wealth of knowledge of those small, hyper-focused communities are unmatched.
Look no further than trying to find fixes through a web search, 90% of the crap you have to wade through is blogspam, which is mostly robot copy/pasted from other blogspam. The really helpful stuff is old forums and Reddit.
You can’t replace those specific questions and that specific knowledge with microblogs, blogs, or long form stuff like medium.
That’s the part that I don’t see how the author got to their position. Surely the author is well aware of the relationship between content and money, and sees the value in a community that’s not driven by the latter?
We are absolutely not over forums especially for niche communities. They’re the best source of information on many topics
I still miss forums, they were easy to use, practical and had years, decades, of development, lessons learned and people with experience with them. You also really felt like it’s a type of community centered around a specific subject instead of a massive conglomeration of topics like reddit, but that could be just due to relative sizes. I also have to admit I’ve been spoiled with having all my feed in one place instead of having to open a dozen bookmarks every day and check them manually though, no matter how charming that was at the time.
When I think about my previous source of niche info – Usenet or Yahoo Email Groups – I vastly prefer forums: searchable, easy to read. (Although changing image hosting has hamstrung many old forums)
What was great about Yahoo Groups was that email would meet the subject matter expert where they were for answers. I was a member of several groups that had old timers with seemingly secret, specific knowledge and a willingness to help others.
I’m a member of a couple Discord servers now with subject matter experts (people who actually designed the computers we’re rebuilding) but all their knowledge is locked behind an unsearchable wall.
I hope Lemmy/Kbin/Fediverse forums catch on and invite a new wave of experts to a place where their knowledge won’t be lost.
With the way the modern world of advertising is – that is, completely built on astroturfing and buying out media placement through sponsorships and SEO – forums are the ONLY way to get certain kinds of good information e.g., product reviews.
We’ve capitalismed ourselves into a position where we cannot trust 3/4 of our primary media.
and where proponents of the untrustable attack those with even a shred of integrity remaining
In search of communities due to some on here not having a high level of activity on the fediverse I ended up with coming across a bunch of forums. So they seem very much alive stil.
The only problem is the “<how to solve this issue> reddit” google search. If these discussions start to be on lemmy and we append lemmy instead of reddit, in time there’s gonna be tons of malicious instances that fill the site with ads and generate content with AI just to get to that google 1st page.
How is that different than what’s currently on reddit? Unless you are talking about 5 years ago, modern reddit is filled with manipulated conversations
It’s not. That’s their point.
Oh, I misunderstood then. It sounded to me like they were saying lemmy was more vulnerable
There’s also no centralised Lemmy site/index yet that centralises that information.
That’s fine and all if you’re looking for content on somewhere like lemmy.ml, or lemmy.world, but you might run into problems if you’re trying to search for something that might be located on beehaw, or sh.it.just.works instead, which doesn’t have the word “lemmy”, and might get skipped.
You also have places like Kbin, which don’t get captured in a search at all, both because they’re not lemmy, and also because they don’t contain the word lemmy, which doesn’t help if you’re trying to search something that you thought was on Lemmy, but is in fact on a Kbin magazine.
Sounds like an opportunity to develop a fediverse focused search engine
Does ActivityPub have search protocols? Seems like something worth having built in
Honestly - it’s Google’s job to find a solution to that. They have bright people, I’m sure they can figure it out.
Assuming they care enough to do so. But with all the SEO spam that’s flooding their search results that they don’t seem to be doing much about, I’m not optimistic. ~Cherri
He thinks we are. I never thought about it before. Maybe in the case of some Reddit subreddits and other forums, but I don’t think so in general. I’ve got a lot great information from forums.
I agree that we’re not past the days of forums. Part of what made forums and Reddit great was that you knew that you were interacting with multiple people, and that a lot of information was filtered through some form of consensus. If the advice given was wrong, you usually had additional replies saying it was incorrect, and pointing out what was wrong, or the OP adding more information if asked/incorrect.
You can’t really do that as easily with blogs and things, both because it’s usually written by one person with presumably little verification (who may have unclear credentials if you’re not familiar with them, or that area of work), even before the rise of AI and auto-generated SEO blogs which say nothing useful with a lot of words.
From a usability standpoint, there is also something nice about a forum, since they’re usually not that terribly infested with ads, or things like algorithms designed to push content and keep people on the platform. You can just come and go as you please, although necroposting is usually frowned upon. At most, you might have some sorting that keeps the posts in chronological/activity order, but that’s about it.
