Reddit has gone significantly more mainstream over the past few years. I remember when a reddit post got 2000 upvotes that was a big deal. Then suddenly it became 4k, 8k, and then I stopped caring it got so large.
Reddit is becoming into a weird beast because I've found theres a mentality of people who assume you actively subscribe to the stuff set by default hence why people get upset when you don't tout the same opinion. I've even had people ask me what I was doing in their subreddit, said I came from /r/all, and they basically said "yeah right." Reddit is probably going to dominate the online forum market since it's so much easier to create a subreddit than it is make your own website with forums.
My only beef with this is reddit silences things they don't like, and not just things that sound reasonable. My rationale is let these people be. They're dumb enough to discuss this garbage on your platform, so why not collect that data and just monitor it? Better than they go elsewhere and now you have no idea.
Also reddit trying to take their anonymous platform and make it so you act as a community member has always been weird to me. That makes sense for public people, not for general users. Especially when bot accounts just harvest upvotes. Twitter is basically what facebook used to be now.
You need to use actual numbers. The total size of the active worldwide userbase on all of Facebook's platforms is at least one order of magnitude larger than reddit. And the revenue they extract from it is larger still. Reddit is merely the world's largest Internet forum. They don't have a moat.
Reddit is a top 20 site, according to Alexa. So they're not doing poorly. And any social website has a moat: the network effects from social connections.
It's at #18, below Wikipedia, live.com, Zoom, Yahoo, the usual suspects (Google/YouTube/Facebook/Amazon) and a bunch of Chinese websites.
All this proves is that the Alexa top N isn't a good metric of determining who is or isn't a monopoly. It's completely ignoring mobile apps (so Instagram/Whatsapp don't make an appearance), and it has no visibility into revenue. Reddit's current total valuation is in the small single digit billions. It doesn't deserve consideration in a conversation about the true gorillas in the field, i.e. the ones that are worth three orders of magnitude more.
I edited my comment to add some proper numbers. Reddit has grown but it's still almost an order of magnitude smaller than Facebook+Instagram. The competition isn't even close.
Reddit is becoming into a weird beast because I've found theres a mentality of people who assume you actively subscribe to the stuff set by default hence why people get upset when you don't tout the same opinion. I've even had people ask me what I was doing in their subreddit, said I came from /r/all, and they basically said "yeah right." Reddit is probably going to dominate the online forum market since it's so much easier to create a subreddit than it is make your own website with forums.
My only beef with this is reddit silences things they don't like, and not just things that sound reasonable. My rationale is let these people be. They're dumb enough to discuss this garbage on your platform, so why not collect that data and just monitor it? Better than they go elsewhere and now you have no idea.
Also reddit trying to take their anonymous platform and make it so you act as a community member has always been weird to me. That makes sense for public people, not for general users. Especially when bot accounts just harvest upvotes. Twitter is basically what facebook used to be now.