I was watching the stream earlier. It was an exciting feeling to have 10,000 people viewing, and cheering on the chat whenever a new subreddit went dark.

I don't know if I should be excited or sad. Reddit is dying, but I'm seeing it live on Twitch with the community cheering on in a festive atmosphere.

The stupidest part of all of this is all Reddit's problems are self inflicted. Reddit the company produces almost nothing. Reddit the users make the site what it is. The users submit all the content, make all the comments, and moderate the site.

Reddit's executives however seem to think they are somehow critical to Reddit's existence and utility. If they all got replaced tomorrow with competent people no one would fucking notice. Everyone would notice if all of Reddit's users disappeared tomorrow.

Reddit is making the same stupid value estimation Digg made.

Well to be fair, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere else for all these users to go, right? So the executives do provide something.

Reddit has about as much technical complexity in its core product as Twitter—both can be trivially cloned. Alternatives exist.

It’s the network effects that made Reddit valuable: the people, communities, 3rd-party clients, platform integrations, etc.

Most of these things are fairly portable, so I think Reddit execs are mainly gambling in users not wanting to bother with finding a new place to gather.

I have to wonder why they didn’t just start off charging reasonable prices for the API and dial things up over time. Crummy either way, but less likely to alienate literally everyone they depend on to make the system work.

> both can be trivially cloned. Alternatives exist

Trivially? No. As can be seen by lack of alternatives of comparable quality.

I think that qualifies at trivial.