Good. Its about time for reddit to wither enough for a more user focused platform yo take it place.
Its the ol model I see time and time again. Site pulls in users by being generally awesome and doing things like not advertising, not censoring, etc. Then the site grows. Businesses start astroturfing because they can't advertise. Then the company slowly starts walking back on everything that made it special, for example, advertising, all while rapidly expanding the personell while hardly doing anything to improve the site for users. Aaaand right when advertising dollars are the best, try to capitalize or take public, followed by a big sale/buyout, and finally within finite time users feel betrayed and it withers and dies, but not until a competitor starts where they did, and usually follows the same path.
I stopped participating in reddit about the time sockpuppetry really started killing my favorite sub's, and personally I think the first and most greiveous mistake was moving away from text only.
The problem as it stands is none of the competitors stand out. I think hn is best, but scope is limited, /. does something's interesting but failed and lost its user base. Voat is too much of a reddit clone, and I just don't get the appeal of steemit etc.
Personally, we need to sit down and figure a better way to measure user worth. Right now I am leaning to a Slashdot style moderation/tagging system, along with a limited input per user at varying thresholds. Something that really interests be is automating logical maps of comments too.
Its the ol model I see time and time again. Site pulls in users by being generally awesome and doing things like not advertising, not censoring, etc. Then the site grows. Businesses start astroturfing because they can't advertise. Then the company slowly starts walking back on everything that made it special, for example, advertising, all while rapidly expanding the personell while hardly doing anything to improve the site for users. Aaaand right when advertising dollars are the best, try to capitalize or take public, followed by a big sale/buyout, and finally within finite time users feel betrayed and it withers and dies, but not until a competitor starts where they did, and usually follows the same path.
I stopped participating in reddit about the time sockpuppetry really started killing my favorite sub's, and personally I think the first and most greiveous mistake was moving away from text only.
The problem as it stands is none of the competitors stand out. I think hn is best, but scope is limited, /. does something's interesting but failed and lost its user base. Voat is too much of a reddit clone, and I just don't get the appeal of steemit etc.
Personally, we need to sit down and figure a better way to measure user worth. Right now I am leaning to a Slashdot style moderation/tagging system, along with a limited input per user at varying thresholds. Something that really interests be is automating logical maps of comments too.