One of the major differences is that there’s no clear alternative.

Digg and Reddit had a lot of overlap in what they were trying to do immediately prior to Digg’s redesign. Reddit was an obvious place to go if you preferred Digg up until that point.

Now what’s the clear alternative to Reddit? Discord is probably the closest just from a UX perspective and I expect to be finding stuff there that I used to find on Reddit in the near future; but it’s not as close as Digg and Reddit were, and a lot of the people that made Reddit into what it was have an issue with Discord’s walled off nature.

How is Discord even a closest alternative? Everything is on its own "server" and conversations happen in real-time, not async like Reddit.

I hate Discord for killing classic forums and therefore robbing us of good searchable niche content.

Not sure how Discord killed forums, they are more like IRC which had existed for a long time alongside forums.

There's a worrying number of instances where people managing a foss project using taking their GitHub issue tracker, discussion boards, or some other public forum / discussion board and deciding to lock it and direct users to a discord guild because it's "easier". Or new communities that start up exclusively on discord but would be better served by alternatives.

Except it's not easier, there was an instance where a community had been using a discord channel as a file sharing platform for mods. An administrator was doing some housekeeping of the channels and accidentally deleted the entire chat history (which is easier to do than it sounds), and so irrevocably deleted all of the uploaded files, some of which were never recovered.

I'm pretty sure Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, et. al. killed off classic forums. Discord and Slack and killed off IRC [though by and large, most will tell you that rumors of its demise is greatly exaggerated].

Depends on the server, and the channel on the server. Depending on the channel, you might get a handful of posts a week while the #general channel might be a non-stop firehose (at least on the more social Discords).

As to how it’s the closest alternative, mainly in that the atomic unit around which Discord is organized like Reddit is the community. On Reddit it’s subreddits and on Discord it is servers and it has gotten complex enough that for server owners Discord is slowly becoming a build your own social network toolbox.

Instead of the sidebar, each channel has pins. You can have an arbitrary number of channels for different topics, and you can even have forum channels where at the root level of the channel are forum topics. Once you’re in a server, searching it is trivial to see what people have said in Subject X in community Y, although this isn’t as good as say, searching all of Reddit is and you have to find a decent community to be able to search it.

Also a lot of subreddits are already running a Discord server on the side with the same or a similar mod team and have been for years. Doesn’t quite resolve Discord’s server discoverability issue, but Reddit doesn’t make the worst springboard for figuring out Discord either. If you support any Patreons or have similar memberships elsewhere, there’s a decent shot you already have access to a number of private members-only Discords which has kind of been my springboard into actually using my Discord account this past year.

But you know, it is very different. I don’t think it’s nearly as perfect an analogue to Reddit as Reddit was to Digg for Digg users, but it’s probably the closest to what Reddit already is.

Search is useless in a Discord server, especially one sufficiently busy enough. You cannot tell at a glance whether a keyword uttered at a specific moment in time is a crapshoot or not. You may have just a single person asking saying the word/phrase, or you may stumble upon whole conversations.

Threads are "ok" but still more ephemeral than a reddit thread.

I'm aware there are subs running discords on the side... and it's just on the side. I've had occasion to visit a few, and most of the time (from my own experience), they are just rehashing discussions already had on reddit and there is usually a channel or two that reposts links to reddit. It's great if you already spend the majority of time in Discord but I don't. I don't have time to sit in a discord and wait to have interesting discussions.

Earlier today, I was met with someone getting upset at me trying to have a discussion; editing prior comments because I called them out on something they had said [snide comments about people being asexual] and blocking me because "I don't fight on Discord".

All that said, I'm willing to give Discord a try here and there- but my prior experiences don't instill a huge amount of faith or hope in me. Until I find a Discord community that provides an analogue to normal discussion, which may never happen.

I can't imagine having to explain things to someone in real-time or helping them with programming issues. I imagine the vast majority of help channels cater to people coming off beginners' tutorials. Many of which can be covered with a simple search through Reddit or Stack Overflow.

To be honest I think the problem for Reddit may be that no one really needs a direct alternative. For me it’s good at one thing which is reviews and in depth educational content on some of the more niche subs. For community though, people can use discord, for content consumption, people seem to be using tik tok, for political flame wars you have Twitter.

I don’t see a bright future for Reddit. A lot of the broad appeal back when I used it more was that it surfaced the best stuff from all over the internet so I didn’t have to sift through all the boring stuff but funny enough now the only time my little sister and her hip friends see Reddit posts is when the best ones have been turned into a tik tok. I doubt this is going to kill Reddit but honestly I think it’s been fighting a losing battle for a while now. I have a feeling its indirect competitors will keep getting better at providing the value reddit does over time in their own way and leave reddit with very little left to offer.

I’ve been mulling this over this morning and in the end, I think you’re right. I keep making the Discord comparison everywhere because from a structural comparison (on Twitter you follow people, on Reddit and Discord you follow communities) it seems the obvious analogue, but honestly it might just be that Reddit can actually die and it would leave no void to be filled by anything in particular.

It's true that the lack of choices back then (other that spezzit) contributed majorly to the migration. But I also think a new paradigm entirely is needed for social media after the fiasco of all the centralized ones, decentralized social media.