I remember when Digg was bigger than Reddit and then after a certain Digg site redesign they lost a significant number of their users to Reddit and never really recovered.
Where are people going to go this time? I feel like people usually copy their competitors which is why they consider redesigns worthwhile... but which Reddit competitor is Reddit copying here? I don't think there is one.
Obviously Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Snapchat kind of worry them, but then again, I feel like people are "done" with "social media" so I wouldn't be _really_ worried if I were Reddit. They have the advantage that they can give the user very interest-focused information; when you follow a friend on Facebook, you get their programming advice, baby pictures, and political rants. With Reddit, you get to skip the baby pictures and political rants.
Just because you think people are "done" with "social media" doesn't mean Reddit execs do. They are definitely changing look and feel to be more like instagram and facebook hoping to poach users or at least widen their userbase by lowering the barrier of entry. One of the primary goals of the redesign was changing look and feel to make the site more approachable to a wider audience. They claimed after extensive testing that the old site scared off many potential users because it was "hard to use" (IMO it just looked old, and therefor bad/lame).
I think the underlying problem is that people want a platform for self-promotion (hence buying followers on Instagram), but most subreddits and maybe the site itself prohibit self-promotion. As a result, many people will never be interested (including me; I use it for pictures of cats, but nothing important).
I mostly went to HN. My own migration was Slashdot → reddit → HN. I'm on lobste.rs too, which feels like it's in the growth stage. Fewer comments, but fewer bad comments still. HN is nowhere near reddit levels of decay, which is nice.
If memory serves, the primary driver of reduced traffic to Digg 4.0 was the fundamental shift in how their submission mechanism worked, not in a change to their layout. I recall some kind of promotion mechanism where superusers gained some amount of control over their "front page" equivalent.
Also, unlike Digg, Reddit hasn't been bleeding members to another site for some time now, so there's nowhere for Reddit users to go if they become dissatisfied. Does anyone have any ideas about why that is? Reddit is not, fundamentally, a hard product to emulate, and yet I know of no site even remotely as popular nowadays (HN aside, of course). Slashdot, Fark, and sites like those all seem to have mostly been consumed by Reddit. Is it the strong network effects that Reddit has, or does Reddit's moderation system provide a unique way of hosting a community that no one has reproduced?
There was post on here awhile ago from an engineer working at digg during the v4 launch that was pretty interesting. https://lethain.com/digg-v4/
I think Discord has been siphoning off some of the users on the gaming related subreddits, but it fundamentally serves a different purpose so its not a wholesale replacement.
Network effect is one for sure. I'm not a fan of the redesign (and submitted my thoughts several times), but the content is there, and it's a reasonable platform overall.
I feel like that would have happened this time if there were a viable alternative. I know if they kill the ability to opt out of the new redesign I will be looking a lot harder for one.
Hasn’t reddit front page become really bad? When I joined there were a lot more textual posts, now it’s all images and memes. More 9gag-y. Maybe taking askscience and atheism and all these subreddits out of the FP was a really bad idea? I wish there was another category next to hot, all, new: an interesting one with a pre-selection of mostly textual subreddits
