Maybe there won’t be a Reddit replacement

The internet’s instinctive reaction to seeing one of the old pillars of social media crumble is to find and promote a replacement. Some new (or newly relevant) project that can slot in perfectly to fill the emerging void, except this time open source, decentralized, federated, whatever. Mastodon for Twitter, Lemmy for Reddit. Here’s my lukewarm take: I think we’re not taking seriously enough a world where there is no replacement. What if not just these platforms, but also the specific forms of internet interaction they represent, just die? Maybe instead of Twitter we just go back to going to actual town squares and yelling our hot takes at random strangers in real life.

Slightly more seriously, here’s a (I think) plausible way things could play out with Reddit. Reddit fails to stop shooting itself in the foot and people try to find somewhere else to go. Perhaps some folks hear the call of the Fediverse! But given how hard it is to get developers to want to deal with the concept of a server (hi lambda!), the general public understandably doesn’t adopt it.

So what happens instead? Well, instead of finding and subscribing to subreddits, the “groups” you associate with end up algorithmically defined by Youtube or Tiktok (tech Youtube and booktok and all). And prominent creators in the space, who perhaps already pay moderators to police the comments section, set up discords or slacks something like that (now with paid mods!) that ultimately fill the Reddit shaped void. Instead of ask historians, you have some discord managed by the mods of a bunch of history creators under the same multi-channel network. Is a scattering of algorithmically determined influencer controlled “communities” and closed off chats better than a well functioning reddit-style link aggregator? The answer is almost certainly no, but there’s no rule of the universe that says things can’t get worse.

Obviously that scenario isn’t a prediction — predicting what’s going to happen in that level of detail is pretty stupid. But it’s a justification for expanding our understanding of what a post-reddit or post-twitter internet might look like. My actual prediction for Reddit is that something about the way the platform relies on enormous amounts of unpaid labor from mods is fundamentally unstable. And since I think all the direct replacements will face the same issues, I boldly and almost certainly incorrectly predict the death of the general purpose link aggregator. What would replace it? Well, if I knew concretely, then I’d be working on it right now and this half-assed blog post would instead be a half-assed ad for my revolutionary new whatever, but yeah idk.

I think usually blog posts are supposed to have some core grand thesis. I don’t have one, and I don’t think this post is substantive enough to back one up, but I do have a thought. For the communities you care about, I think it’s worth considering what happens if Reddit (or an analogous bit of social glue) dies and nothing else fills the void. If there’s no new thing to cleanly migrate to with the same type of discoverability and features that Reddit provides. Should we proactively spin up our own forum? Is some radically new, sustainable form of social media just around the corner, and should we be experimenting with it? I can’t say I 100% love the creatorification of everything, where every social media platform evolves into a small group of career superusers that everyone else passively consumes content and ads from, but those platforms have good discoverability so maybe they become even more important 🤷

So, yeah. Maybe there’s no replacement, and we should be figuring out how to deal with/shape that world. Or maybe instead reddit will be fine or a carbon copy replacement will swoop in and save the day. In that case, this whole blog is a waste of time — so consider it instead as an attempt to fill the time-wasting void left by the blackouts. In conclusion, the internet peaked at webrings, and everything after that was a mistake. Happy redditing, maybe