Do you think the future of social media looks like Discord/Reddit?

Reddit and Discord are very different. Reddit is a holdover from the '00s phpBB /somethingawful /slashdot /digg messageboard era. Like messageboards, it was always public, which is how people discovered it, and went on to join specific communities.

Discord is a instant messaging product that reflects modern social media priorities of walling everything off behind a user login; anathema to the public-facing nature of Reddit and Digg. If there's anything that prevents regular people from joining Discord, it's that you actually have to be told to join a specific discord, for something you're interested in. You can't click a link from someplace and see something interesting happening there.

I think the future of the Internet will contain a lot of "Join to download!" so I hope the Reddit model prevails.

Discord communities are regressive in that they're not indexed by search engines so a lot of the activity and information there may as well be nonexistent.

Honestly neither are that great. There are active demoralization and harassment campaigns, and the platform by design is a one to many communication platform. The people that run it decide what gets seen, and places like reddit that do not prevent multiple accounts proactively have a real bot problem.

If you believe all those people talking are real people you'd be very wrong. Most are bots designed to harass contributors, threaten credibility, and waste time resources without providing anything back.

If the future of social media looks like Reddit, we should just cancel the internet and go outside instead.

95% of Reddit is a cesspool...never the subs you frequent, though...

I think the future is going to be fake social media websites that tailor make all the content to your preferences. Aka LLM generated content.

You know how in Minecraft (and other games) how they have infinite maps? You just keep on exploring and the game generates new lands for you to explore? That is what the future of social networks will be.

I think Reddit outgrew the "gamer/nerd" thing you mention, some years ago. It's a mainstream site.

Smaller communities are great but you still need ways for people to find each other, or they just die. For example, if you write a blog, how does anyone find it who isn’t already subscribed?

Reddit has subject-based discussions, good SEO, and subreddits are distinct enough to have a sense of place. One downside is that outsiders can just drop in and post, often without reading the rules, so you will often get a constant influx of newbie questions - the eternal September problem.

Discord has no SEO, so you’d need some other way of helping people find it. It seems better for people who don’t want to be found?

Facebook is the brand that's not gamer nerd culture. You have groups there, lots of normies you may not regularly interact with use that platform quite a bit.

I think it's too difficult to speculate what the next big social platform is/will be though. It goes through cycles from what I've observed. Generally the platform changes in a direction that the community at large doesn't like which causes a fragmentation to occur and other sites pick up the loss to start the process again.

> getting away from all the noise traditional social media has.

Why do you presume the general population actually want to get away from "the noise", or that they even consider it noise? They're the ones making the stories and posts and aren't so happy that you called their feed "noise".

I think the future of social media looks a lot like Instagram, because that's where social media is today, and it's crazy, I know, but some people actually like Instagram.

I'd definitely say it's something closer to Discord than Reddit or the likes. Because it feels like people want to be in mostly self contained communities with those that share their own values and interests, and where outsiders looking for ammunition/dirt are left empty handed. That last part seems to be what did in Reddit for a lot of controversial communities, because it quickly saw them covered by media outlets and the site pressured to remove them. It also sees a lot of its content recycled by other outlets too, like Buzzfeed and their ilk.

So it feels like a lot of communities want a space where they can carefully vet who can participate, lock out those trying to cancel or shut them down and keep discussions among themselves without randoms jumping in and stirring up trouble.

Reddit is too centralized. I like the idea of the fediverse where people can run their own instances and run small cozy communities which are easier to moderate by virtue of being small. You don't need sophisticated machine learning algos or shadow banning to filter out bad actors. You just nuke accounts which broke the rules.

Excited for things like Lemmy[0]. If everyone had their own Lemmy instance it would vastly improve the Internet and social media.

[0] https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

Reddit has grown so much in the past few years. I frequently surprised at how much local content I can find on there now. Their mobile offering is now video heavy and will be competing with TikTok pretty soon.

But it has changed - Reddit used to be amazing. I agree with /u/JimtheCoder's comment: "95% of Reddit is a cesspool...never the subs you frequent, though... "

I hope the future of the internet is not reddit.

Discord yes, small communities with barriers to entry, posts broadcast only to that community not the entire planet.

Reddit, no. Reddit is 15+ years old now. It is what it is, a news aggregator site with volunteer mods to police content. I don't see how they grow either revenues or users which is why they are trying to ipo and cash out.

Did all of you forget that TikTok exists and is vastly more popular than anything mentioned in this thread? How can you talk about the future of social media and disregard gen z?

I stopped using Reddit a couple of years back because it was getting to be more of a cesspool than I was willing to put up with, so for me, anyway, it's not better than other social media.

People watching AI bots playing minecraft.

delete discord and reddit. embrace github.

being constrained to support git is a fantastic constraint.

Look at gunjs to see what the web will look like in 2030

I think the future of social media is an oxymoron. Concentration of capital trends toward that direction (at least in the near term), but this doesn't mean it's what people want or need.

If what we're at is called late-stage capitalism, since it is the theoretical end of the road, there's nowhere to go but backward.