Good doc. Digg which was popular years ago ended up becoming advertising disguised as news. Because a front page digg link generated so much traffic people quickly realised by gaming the site they could make a nice amount of profit from ad-venue etc. The site was almost setup to make this possible, as people would have a network of 'friends' which would vote on each others links. Frustration of grew in the user base, at this obvious gaming as well as censorship of certain topics that were happening. In the end I forget the guys name, but he took one of the most popular sites on the internet and literally sold it to media/advertisers effectively destroying it, removing the ability for users to upvote stories and comment. It was truly ridiculous, but I guess the guy made off with a nice sum of money.
Reddit was always vulnerable to the same corruption, but I think because of the way it was setup initially it lasted longer before the same kind of corruption happened. I mean there are sites where you can literally buy upvotes and game the system. This has been known since forever, and no admins ever cared to mention it. But what I think really killed reddit was Trump. Trump, love him or hate him had HUGE online grass roots support. During the election cycle correct the record with a budget of millions publicly stated they were going to game social media sites (including reddit) totally transformed politics on the main subs in favor of Clinton, almost over night. Ultimately this failed as Clinton still lost. But I believe after this reddit totally got in bed with government and special interests to remove all conservatives. The same thing happened to twitter. But they turned a decent site into a cluster fuck from hell.
Good doc. Digg which was popular years ago ended up becoming advertising disguised as news. Because a front page digg link generated so much traffic people quickly realised by gaming the site they could make a nice amount of profit from ad-venue etc. The site was almost setup to make this possible, as people would have a network of 'friends' which would vote on each others links. Frustration of grew in the user base, at this obvious gaming as well as censorship of certain topics that were happening. In the end I forget the guys name, but he took one of the most popular sites on the internet and literally sold it to media/advertisers effectively destroying it, removing the ability for users to upvote stories and comment. It was truly ridiculous, but I guess the guy made off with a nice sum of money.
Reddit was always vulnerable to the same corruption, but I think because of the way it was setup initially it lasted longer before the same kind of corruption happened. I mean there are sites where you can literally buy upvotes and game the system. This has been known since forever, and no admins ever cared to mention it. But what I think really killed reddit was Trump. Trump, love him or hate him had HUGE online grass roots support. During the election cycle correct the record with a budget of millions publicly stated they were going to game social media sites (including reddit) totally transformed politics on the main subs in favor of Clinton, almost over night. Ultimately this failed as Clinton still lost. But I believe after this reddit totally got in bed with government and special interests to remove all conservatives. The same thing happened to twitter. But they turned a decent site into a cluster fuck from hell.