yumcake

The mass-scale casual interaction producing flashes of surprising relevance can’t happen when the conditions aren’t pulling in so many people that the 1 in 300 million person with the answer doesn’t casually happen across the question that only he/she can answer. That’s the unique content from Reddit.

Link aggregation, message boarding, messaging, all that stuff is merely tech that lots of other places have. Reddit’s moat is the user presence which other platforms can’t just replicate. Reddit needs to die first so that 1 in 300 person stops going there and goes to other places and somehow runs into the question there, hopefully in a way that they turn up in Google search.

Is the fediverse where that happens? Seriously asking because I’m no expert on it. It doesn’t seem like the concept can scale distribution at that level. There will be pockets of interaction, but not everything is shared everywhere.

I am too, however one of the differentiating qualities of Reddit was it’s scale. The “hive mind” of posts being visible to such a broad audience is that you’d sometimes run into insights into niche experts on obscure topics. If the audience is too small, those posters don’t encounter the question, and we lose the opportunity to see them share their insight into the topic.

I do hope the fediverse eventually scales to a point where serendipitous interactions like that can start happening again. It’ll probably take a fair bit of time after the Reddit diaspora for the public to make their way to one instance or another.

Yeah, I feel like the generative AI Google has added (for those who opt-in) has been a pretty useful enhancement. It will read through the results and try to summarize it back to me in a useful way, the same kind of summary I’d typically try to find by including Reddit in the search term.

However…it’s pretty common for the AI result to get some of it’s information from Reddit postings. Like this morning I asked “on myfitnesspal is the fitbit calorie adjustment accurate?” and it had some of the generic chat answers about how calorie estimation is done in general in exercise science, but the most useful bit was the last sentence claiming that “MyFitnessPal overestimates calorie needs in 95% of cases because it overestimates calories burned from activity”.

That’s a pretty broad conclusion, and the first supporting link it provided was a detailed 8-year old reddit posting from a software developer examining the MFP calculation, comparing against measured study results on calorie burn estimates by activity, and noting a consistent overestimate by roughly 20-30% which appears to fall in line with the baseline calorie burn that users would experience even if they did not perform that exercise activity. His conclusion was that the estimate is directionally reliable if you deduct 20-30% for the double-counting of sedentary calorie burn.

That kind of in-depth examination by someone with expertise and without financial motivation is the contribution of the “hive mind” the critical mass of people serendipitously stumbling across topics/questions they have answers for and volunteering useful information. We’re going to lose a lot of that unless or until some replacement for reddit pops up. A diaspora of small niches of information may not be as useful if it is buried on bot-generated clutter in a way that search isn’t able to sift signal out of the noise.