Reddit, once the frontpage of the Internet, has shot itself in the foot and feels more and more a hollow place, after a long decline from its brilliant heydays. Nothing has replaced it for me as there is nothing that feels like it nowadays. We are too spread out.
The day HN dies, we will be even more spread out. We will probably never find a decent replacement for it. And for many of us, this is the last bastion of pre-recommendation algorithm social spaces. Where it still feels somewhat human in its sprawl. Even if it's far too early to say, where will we hang out?
However, there's a subreddit for reddit alternatives (r/RedditAlternative) if you're curious :)) Lemmy and lobsters are the dominant ones in my mind.
For HNews? Probably https://diff.blog/ would be one of the alternatives. I must say, if reddit goes dark today, I'd be sad, but if hnews goes dark today (and forever), I'd be pretty devastated.
Lots of useful knowledge hidden behind walled gardens these days.
I build a UI layer on top of the HN API to attract a more general audience. But it's only a "reader", you can't sign in and start posting. I'd be happy to keep it that way.
My suspicion is that the current interface design and feature set of HN only attracts a certain kind of audience. The moment that changes, I think then we'll start to see a decrease in quality, which to me is the death bell of a social network. On the flip-side, if HN doesn't adapt, will it eventually observe a decrease in traffic as the visual appeal fails to land on newer generations of people?
These days, whenever I visit a Reddit post with a decent question being asked, and see the first handful of comments are joke responses with upvotes and badges, I just leave.
Paradoxically, that makes it better. Facebook groups are just thriving now, like mushrooms after the rain. The old days of FB had people making meme groups so they could rebrand it into a fashion group and sell it off to be merged into an established fashion brand. Reddit just has plenty of people who would make jokes at your expense or ignore a post to be the first to make a joke and harvest lots of upvotes.
It becomes more 4chan and less well, reddit, people are just more genuine.
Without the people gaming these platforms, they're usually a much better place to visit. I don't visit reddit anymore though, but I might when the dust settles in a few years.
A reddit-like death may be a good thing for HN. Maybe people will stop campaigning against crypto, AI, frameworks, whatever they're feeling insecure about, and just rationally discuss their interests knowing that nobody important is reading.
I find that Kurzgesagt's video on social media touches this subject very well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuFlMtZmvY0&t=602s&pp=ygUYa3...
but it hasn't left yet, so let's enjoy the conversation while we have it and worry about the next clubhouse when the time comes.
I'm glad I finally quit, but now I just check hn twice as much. at least there are less memes tho
That being said, i agree the value and quality isn’t as high as it once was.
For HN, I think it may outlive us all, but in the case it doesn’t people will find a place, it may not even exist yet, lobste.rs seems like an alternative at the moment.
If we fast forward long enough after the true demise of reddit and or HN, then I think it's pretty obvious that the outcome is that most people have moved on to a platform that does forum posting in a new and fresh way that solves some big problems users felt existed (a good example of this is the demise of Skype despite them being a top notch product but severely behind the potential).
Just like digg before it, Reddit was dead the moment a corporation bought it with the intent of combining it with other businesses.
But as another comment mentioned - discourse finds a way over and over again. And if you want something to exist, the best part is that you can just roll up your sleeves and get to work building it.