Help me understand the popularity of Reddit
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I've been a fan of forums for years (decades, even...) going all the way back to BBSes and newsgroups. However, in recent years, I've noticed that more and more discussions have been moving to Reddit and Discord. While I understand the appeal of subreddits covering nearly every conceivable topic, I struggle to see why Reddit, in particular, has become so dominant. It lacks many features that decent forums take for granted, yet it seems to be steadily wiping out independently hosted forums. Am I missing something obvious that explains its popularity?
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I've been a fan of forums for years (decades, even...) going all the way back to BBSes and newsgroups. However, in recent years, I've noticed that more and more discussions have been moving to Reddit and Discord. While I understand the appeal of subreddits covering nearly every conceivable topic, I struggle to see why Reddit, in particular, has become so dominant. It lacks many features that decent forums take for granted, yet it seems to be steadily wiping out independently hosted forums. Am I missing something obvious that explains its popularity?
I think one of the main benefits is just using a single account to access all subreddits, this applies to discord as well. Signing up to new forums is a big barrier for most people.
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I've been a fan of forums for years (decades, even...) going all the way back to BBSes and newsgroups. However, in recent years, I've noticed that more and more discussions have been moving to Reddit and Discord. While I understand the appeal of subreddits covering nearly every conceivable topic, I struggle to see why Reddit, in particular, has become so dominant. It lacks many features that decent forums take for granted, yet it seems to be steadily wiping out independently hosted forums. Am I missing something obvious that explains its popularity?
Reddit is a single place where people can go, it has a mobile app that streamlines sign-up, it's a reasonably big and familiar name, and it has a subreddit for everything.
The modern Internet user access stuff through their phone, and is primarily about content ingestion. An app and a boat load of diverse content snags them. And forum users have been migrating there for years now because it's more active on the topics they care about. For a lot of us, we used small forums, and losing even a small percentage of users to big corporate social media turned those spaces into ghost towns as the user count dropped below critical levels.
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I think one of the main benefits is just using a single account to access all subreddits, this applies to discord as well. Signing up to new forums is a big barrier for most people.
To piggyback on what @baris said, the ease of setting up your own subreddit is also a killer feature. Same reason why Facebook Groups is so popular, despite it being objectively poorer feature-wise.
A lot of forums center around "one forum site, one topic", but it could be that forums themselves need to evolve and democratize the process of setting up (sub)categories, so that non-admins can do it too.
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I am hopeful that more independent forums integrating with the Fediverse will help reverse the migration to the Reddit borg. I believe that the ability to delegate traditionally admin-only tasks, such as category creation and moderation, to non-admins would be a huge step in the right direction. Ideally, moderation should be granular enough to allow users to manage their own topics.
I haven't kept up with the current state of account federation in the Fediverse. Is it possible for accounts on a NodeBB forum to access and respond to content on another forum?
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^^ everyones missing the big draw to Reddit ..
If you google anything, Reddit discussions on the topic come up top.
Its like a sponsored link, same as Quora that comes up high (but most people dont like!)Reddit autogenerates you an Id name, so when you click on that topic you are set up to respond.
Ease of use! -
I am hopeful that more independent forums integrating with the Fediverse will help reverse the migration to the Reddit borg. I believe that the ability to delegate traditionally admin-only tasks, such as category creation and moderation, to non-admins would be a huge step in the right direction. Ideally, moderation should be granular enough to allow users to manage their own topics.
I haven't kept up with the current state of account federation in the Fediverse. Is it possible for accounts on a NodeBB forum to access and respond to content on another forum?
@razibal said in Help me understand the popularity of Reddit:
> Is it possible for accounts on a NodeBB forum to access and respond to content on another forum?Yes that is currently now the case in v4
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>If you google anything, Reddit discussions on the topic come up top.
Maybe it's just the things that I search but this isn't the case for me. I always have to put
redditwhen doing google searches
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Reddit is good when you want to reach people from all over the world. And some users there are not computer geeks. For some topics replies are really good.
Funny thing is how their chat works. Or better said how users actually hate it. 50% or more Reddit users tell others to go and chat elsewhere. This is really odd and even moderators there are in the same boat telling how bad it is. Even weirder.
All in all a good alternative to well established social media sites. But definitely not an alternative for NodeBB. And will never be.
NodeBB can't be replaced by Reddit or anything else. That's true for today and for future.
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@razibal I think that is always going to happen when your algorithm prioritizes engagement of single posts over the health of a larger conversation.
