Can't happen soon enough. The days where forums were the defacto place for discussion were just better. The communities would self-police and alternative opinions weren't suppressed nearly as easily. Reddit is a meme slideshow, not a place for discussion.

The long tail of reddit is the same as forums. I'm subscribed a bunch of niche subreddits for products I own, projects, etc and it's just like forums except with a measure of consistency and features that I appreciate. These communities are self-policed the same as any other forum.

The problem with reddit isn't technical, it's human. A large group of people will ruin literally anything.

You just have to be in the proper small subreddits. Reddit is where I get the highest quality of discussion (especially since Covid-19 as small subreddits stayed small but HN went downwards)

I don't want to register zillions of forums and manage my passwords. I contribute to hundreds of subreddits. If reddit dies I'll find a replacement like reddit and move on.

>I don't want to register zillions of forums and manage my passwords.

and I don't especially want the admins of any one site to be able to erase my entire existence off the net on a whim.

single/token login from known net authority agents is common. I'd rather embrace that kind of thing than the idea that any one site should be our de facto forum and communications standard.

I was reminded of this recently when a personal favorite BB forum disappeared , taking years and years of niche automotive data with it. Data that was rare from the get-go, and un-replaceable now.

I'd rather decentralize my 'data-stores'. Reddit will disappear one day, and it's up to them to be a good actor towards the archival group, providing data bandwidth during a time when investors have become disinterested, and paying the light bill is near impossible.

I wouldn't count on that.

Keep archives, repeat information elsewhere , and most importantly : don't embrace adding and relying on centralized structure where doing so inherently adds weakness and fallibility.

I don't think any "irreplacable" data or conversation should be on reddit. If I lose my conversations about funny cats, or factorio, or why I love a programming language, I'm not gonna lose any sleep over it. I agree with you for critical stuff, I don't think they belong to reddit. But please understand that for consumers like me, reddit is an incredibly convenient social media. I can login now and spend hours talking about hundreds of different things. There is no way in hell I'll be able to register to so many different forums and not get frustrated.

> “Reddit will disappear one day, and it's up to them to be a good actor towards the archival group, providing data bandwidth during a time when”

Reddit’s content is already dumped and cloned in near-real-time. https://pushshift.io/

This is why an ActivityPub based, federated forum system might be the future here. Have it so you can join the network once, and carry the same username to any other site on the network without anything resembling a signup process. Perhaps you could even have a choice of aggregators which then displayed content from all those sites in one place, or let you view a combined karma score or post count or whatever too.

That'd fix most of Reddit's issues and then some.

A "log in with Google/Apple/Github/whatever" fixes that issue easily enough.

And most websites implement that? I like r/factorio on reddit. Factorio official forums require me to register with a username, email and password. I simply don't want to do that, and will not do that. I'd much rather not engage with factorio content than register a forum for 100s and 100s of things I'm interested in.

I think it just shifts it to Google/Apple/Github/whatever "owns" id management.

The biggest hit against reddit is that every large sub has to resort to weekly discussion posts/tagging every post so people can filter, simply because of the way subreddits are forced to be laid out.

A normal forum will have different sections to discuss everything even mildly related to the overarching topic, and a number of areas to talk about things not related to the topic. But Reddit doesn't have those features, so subs have to resort to these half measures or allow multiple daily posts about the same 5 topics.

A solution is creating more niche subs, As an example the main Star Trek sub is very relax, so you get a variety of posts there and the comments vary in quality from very informed ones to just memes , hare and entitlement. So there are sister sub-reddits , I like r/DaystromInstitute because if has a narrow scope and the moderation is strong no lazy comments allowed. There are subreddits for each Star Trek series(even the old one get hate and low effort meme comments) so you can discuss your favorite show and keep out the hate and meme comments. IMO this is the best thing, I seen it in gaming too, because fans will not agree which version of the game is good and which one is trash so they make smaller sub-reddits to talk in peace. Though you need someone to kickstart things and force moderation, then the community grows a bit and it can self moderate.

It's a matter of scale. As size grows, rules become harder to enforce and the amount of comments that would derail conversations sky-rocket. Living under the same rules globally, esp. across ideologies and world-views, is a disaster for everyone.

They’ve been working hard at that for a while.

The last I heard they still weren’t profitable.

I read digg multiple times a day.

It is far better than it was over a decade ago.

As an aggregator, it is nearly perfectly aligned with my interests (except for the year they spent heavily promoting Jimmy Fallon).

That doesn't really say anything.

I read CNN multiple times a day.

As a news site, it is nearly perfectly aligned with my interests.

OP hopes digg goes away. I point out that it is a good site.

Where did I lose you?

I see people writing this for years now. I guess at some point in history it will become true but I don't see a steep decline that would justify it atm.

True of every website eventually, but if data is any indication that won't be happening any time soon.

Digg dug their own grave with the sweeping changes that drove everyone to reddit.