I think Reddit is headed down the same path as Twitter, it's not going to die, but it will be less popular and less relevant. The most popular subreddits appeal to a broad/general audience that doesn't care much about API access or moderation tools. That is, the average user who is there just for the memes and doom scrolling the latest news. It's these popular subreddits that will continue to drive traffic, serve ad impressions, and keep the site alive for the foreseeable future. It's the niche special interest subreddits that are going to suffer the greatest.<p>Jellyfin recently launched their own forum a week ago in response to the Reddit turmoil. I expect to see this happening more, as distrust in the major platforms grows, people will begin moving to self-hosted solutions so that they're in control, no longer at the mercy of a for-profit organization whose only interest is monetizing their content. <a href="https://forum.jellyfin.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://forum.jellyfin.org/</a><p>I think federated platforms will also have their place, fill some niche, but will never completely replace the major social platforms.
How much of the previous disruptions came with actual improvements to the user experience? Or at least something novel?<p>Moving from Facebook to Instagram offers a different experience. Moving from Instagram to TikTok offers a different experience.<p>Moving from Twitter to Mastodon offers...a very similar experience, but without the central control...which also has downsides.<p>The MySpace to Facebook shift also occurred almost 20 years ago? A slightly different environment...<p>I guess what I am trying to say is that I am not so optimistic that they will die.
Tiktok, reddit, twitch? (de facto a social media platform) Yes, of course: just look at their disastrous policies, especially the ones lately implemented.(In the case of the first 2, imo their entire design is somewhat made to implode sooner or later)<p>As for Twitter? Not really. It might go the facebook route of slowly stagnating and becoming used by "platform loyalists" or something, but from what i've seen this is not the case. A lot of the usage is lower on Twitter because Tiktok exists.[The obvious reasons: zoomers, low attention span, video preference, etc] And let's be honest: decentralized/federated platforms are nowhere near ready for usage by the masses, from a technical POV.<p>Funnily enough if you were to ask me pre-2022 or even pre-2020 which platform will die first: i would have said Twitter, but Elon, like it or not, somehow salvaged it(for the moment at least). Reddit is probably the first to die[their platform design really isn't unique, essentially], Tiktok in the next 3 years tops: whether organically or not[it's really irrelevant, because even most of their "organic" traffic is arguably mostly inorganic due to their own immoral practices). Obviously i ignored dinosaurs in agony like Facebook and Instagram: they're just big and decay slowly.
The resilient services are those that occupy a non-gimmicky niche. I’ll explain the difference between a real niche and a contrived or gimmicky one.<p>For example, YouTube is the video site. That’s its niche.<p>TikTok occupies a more gimmicky niche; short-form videos with a gazillion little features to make it more fun. People may (will) eventually get tired of it. The funny thing is they may move to a service with a very similar offering but with a different style and gimmicks.<p>The ones that don’t fill a niche at all are also less resilient following this thinking, though other factors like being utterly entrenched (facebook) may keep them around a long time.<p>Another site that fills a real niche well is Instagram. It’s the pictures site. It’s nice to just scroll and see pictures, though they’ve diversified with reels and video content (which may actually be a bad idea in the long run).<p>Another classic example of a gimmicky niche service was Vine, though I preferred that to TikTok (which I don’t use aside from having played with it for a week).<p>I’m not saying that non-niche services can’t last, but niche services definitely have inherent advantage for longevity because they fill a simple need and it’s hard or not constructive even for challengers to differentiate.
My take on it is (1) this phenomenon is worse than people think, and (2) Facebook so far has been able to keep ahead of it. That is, Facebook has been quick to buy out competitors like WhatsApp and Instagram. Also around the time that Facebook built an advertising business, funding fell away for social media startups because it was generally believed that Facebook's moat couldn't be defeated.
> I have a TikTok account but don’t interact with anyone; I just consume content. This is like YouTube where I just consume content too. Whereas on Twitter, Reddit, Discord, and Mastodon, I do interact with people, comment and reply, et al.<p>I use TikTok a lot but not just for watching things. I write comments, I make videos, and I send DMs to other people on TikTok.<p>Conversely back when I was using Facebook, I was wasting a lot of time scrolling Facebook but I am not sure I was really being social on Facebook either.
I think that for fundamental reasons, the main thesis is correct.<p>We live in a world where change begets change; any engineer will see that this is an exponentiating process, capable of "runaway" change.<p>I think that the information world is very easily changed, compared to the physical world.<p>No structure can withstand exponentiating change - quod est demonstrandum.
This is also why everything on the Internet is NOT forever. Eventually the data that you post on that one site will disappear, get absorbed into some data lake when the company goes under, and eventually get out of date and become irrelevant as it will be unusable for targeting - your ad profile will change with age.
This is par for the course for any company, especially an internet-based company. I mean, all of the sites that were popular in the early 2000's are essentially dead now. The same will happen with all of the sites that are popular now.<p>Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc, all survived so long because of how dirt cheap money was in 2010-2021. Now, these sites that prioritized growth above profit are having to do an about face and prioritize profit. More aggressive ad tracking, once exclusive features being available for anyone to buy, once standard features locked behind a paywall.<p>Web 1.0 "failed" because businesses couldn't make money on the internet. So the companies locked down their ecosystems and brought us to web 2.0. Which is now failing because they still couldn't find out how to make enough money on the internet.<p>Web 3.0 isn't looking so positive either. Crypto is a verified dud to the average user. Decentralization has some good ideas and I'd be happy to see how that grows, but that still begs the question of how do you make money? Individually ran servers can be expensive, especially if that instance begins to see a lot of traffic. So either we do the same-old, same-old and try to push ads (which I doubt server owners would be happy with and would flee the platform), or put the entire front-end app accessing ActivityPub/etc. behind a paywall.<p>I really don't see a way that the internet will be able to continue on in it's current iteration with silo'd for-profit companies controlling 95% of the web. I truly believe we'll be moving into an age in the next decade or two of individual intranets. We'd all have our own little world of an internet where we can communicate and interact with our friends, family, individuals we invite into our server. Then access the wider web when necessary to connect with other companies/work servers/etc.