Comment on why doesnt reddit have a big tech forum competitor?

• southsamurai@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Gotcha :)

  Yeah, I think it comes down to what I said. No good reason to try and compete when they could scrape all the data that they would have wanted without having to build their own.

  It isn’t like any of the big social media companies wanted competition anyway. They wanted to dominate their niche. Twitter for short messages publicly transmitted. Instagram for image based posting. Facebook for mixed media sharing, etc. You find a niche, dominate it, then leverage that dominance into cash flow, usually via ads.

  If you go into the niche someone else already dominates, it’s an uphill struggle. You’re better off just waiting and either buying out the other companies, or otherwise gaining access to what they have that’s valuable.

  Hell, that’s meta’s playbook for sure, that’s what they keep doing.

  Google did try to kinda horn in on the Facebook style social media, can’t remember what it was called, but it flopped and they killed it. You’d think their greed for data for ad targeting might have made it attractive to at least try, but the fact that they eventually just paid reddit for access after a bit of a stink shows they had previously been hoovering it for free. Why invest millions or even billions when it’s already available without the investment?

  I think that part of it was also that reddit didn’t start as a forum. It was digg mark2. A link aggregator. It kept expanding its scope and turned into a forum. It was a big deal when comments were added to reddit, a major shift in how it worked. A lot of people hated it.

  That’s my take anyway.

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