Why do people think they need these big centralized authoritarian "communities" on the internet? In the late 90's and early 2000's we ran PHP forums from our parents houses.
Say I spend time on r/digg, then I find out about r/hackernews. I can start browsing there without creating a new account immediately. That lack of friction between communities is probably Reddit's biggest strength. I can't even imagine how many PHP forums have leaked my email address over the decades.
Then you have the problem of "wait, which site did I sign up for this random forum for, google, facebook, or twitter?" and still keeps the problem of needing to establish the account, things like a profile picture, signature, email preferences, learning that forum's etiquette, the forum's organization (where's "general"?), and then only after a non-trivial investment might you find out that the mods are actually dicks so it's not worth the effort.
On reddit, I can click the "random" button and immediately discover a community that I can already post in. Do I want to talk on r/entrepreneur, or r/galaxytab (the actual two first subreddits that "random" took me to just now)? I can do that right now, and while there I also see the orangered envelope telling me I got replies to comments I made on r/zelda (also a true story of what happened when I just clicked "random").
This is not a big deal for you, it's the biggest deal for me. I refuse to make any other registrations unless absolutely necessary (healthcare/hospital website etc). If your website asks me for a password, I don't care enough to register.
I don’t know man. I feel like it’s pretty self evident why folks would not want to have 20 different logins for 20 different websites so that they can get information for all of their hobbies, professional questions, travel, etc.
As someone in the film industry, I lean very heavily DVXuser, Cinema5D, and Gear Source. Three different sites with three different cultures and ways of doing things. I really like them and they are great resources, but frankly, I find myself on Reddit most of the time anyway because it’s just easier to get the information I need from a variety of communities all in one spot.
Oh, let me tell you about the real community young one, Usenet. Once upon a time, there was this system where servers collaborated and exchanged posts overnight with this dark magic called UUCP. In the morning you would wake up, and messages, discussions and such would be structured, and organized in a sane, logical manner! That is right! We did it both ways, uphill, in shorts!
We good import certain "branches" into our BBSes, respond, and then at night we dialed up the nearest BBS or system and exchanged our messages. Sooner or later the entire collection was exchanged, and everyone was up to date. Not just that, you could slice off a piece and then splice it back in (FidoNet), and it still worked!
You can have a discussion in comp.compression and lo, people would discuss only compression! You wanted to chat about something off the wall? You can find it under the alt. branch, and lo people talked off the wall stuff!
I have the same sentiment, but think we might have been in the minority. You might have run PHP forums from your parents' houses, but most people don't have that experience. I think a lot of the more successful social media sites over the years essentially are offering a centralized, easy-to-use equivalent to some of those federated systems (for example, personal blog RSS feeds -> Twitter, PHP forum -> Reddit). People use them precisely because they couldn't set up PHP forums in their house.
The centralized experience doesn't hurt either. It's just easier enough to search for a subreddit on Reddit, than it is to scour through Google search results for a forum topic.
Having said that, by the same token I really don't quite understand why some modern decentralized or federated alternatives haven't taken off more. The tech is there, some of the options I've seen are pretty good or at least promising, but it feels like often there's some social angle that gets in the way (simple critical mass, branding/positioning, complete lack of enough moderation to at least get something off the ground, etc). It seems to me a decentralized or federated system is a good fit for Reddit-style network structures, with lots of smaller nodes and community membership patterns that are relatively circumscribed for most people.
People who grew up in the Web 2.0 era are obsessed with trends and influence. Posit A#1 of these people is: The more people who think something, the truer it is. Therefore, you must be in the biggest group of people possible in order for your groupthink be true. A small group that tries to disagree with a big group is wrong. Therefore, their ideas will die, and there is no point in being a member of such a group. You might as well just think for yourself, which, as they all know, is insane.
