Reddit is the perfect metaphor for America. What was once a beautiful and accessible tapestry of independent contributions, has been gated and monetized. Now it is a place for slop, misinformation, and vitriol.
That it receives support in this form speaks to the mental health of its participants.
For context, one year:
it’s not down because of digg, literally no investor cares about digg. It’s down because ad spending is down. Ad networks are spending steady on places like google and meta but they’re spending less on reddit.
Apparently this is because reddit sucks at the targeted ad game part and the advertisers feel they get a better return by just building a presence on the platform (eg bots that go “oh that’s cool. By the way have you tried the new Taco Bell™ PepsiCo™ Shitbowl®, now with 10% less petroleum byproducts?”).
This likely means they will become more aggressive about data collection and backend analysis of that data to get conversions up but they’ve been doing this for ages already. Reddits staff ballooned up long before the API fiasco and most of the hires were related to analytics. It only works if they can shift the culture away from nerd haven (aka people with adblockers who despise being advertised to and won’t click through) to facebook grandmas and ig normies that apparently love clicking ads.
They’re at least somewhat successful: while I and most of the people on this platform have shifted away from reddit they aren’t bleeding users like you want to believe. They’re not seeing exponential growth either, but they are seeing shifts to some of those populations. Anecdotally I have several family members in their 40s and 50s who were known for facebook drama and they are adopting tiktok and reddit nowadays. They eat up the obviously fake shit on relationshipadvice and places like that bc they’re primed from spending all day scrolling ig and youtube shorts to just digest content without any questioning of veracity and they ultimately love the outrage cycle.
Would be kinda funny if Digg consumed reddit’s userbase after so many people having come from there in the early days.
I remember when “Remember Digg?” was a meme on early Reddit.
Real funny, because Ohanian is partially behind the new Digg.
Unfortunately probably temporary. Digg is very unlikely to be a better reddit. They dont have the content or the users.
That’s pretty nonsensical logic.
By that logic, reddit never would have been a thing, because they didn’t have the content or the users, because they were all on digg.
No one migrated en masse to Lemmy because making an account here is too much work for someone to just hop on over and check out.
