I think the act of god will be really exactly what you guys have done, creating an open source code that allows smaller versions of these things to pop up, eventually companies will see the value in running their own and start adopting their own social networks and the giants will fall from thousands of pin pricks rather than any one giant blow.
I think the act of god will be really exactly what you guys have done, creating an open source code that allows smaller versions of these things to pop up, eventually companies will see the value in running their own and start adopting their own social networks and the giants will fall from thousands of pin pricks rather than any one giant blow.
This is not the case though, or the post we just read would have never existed in the first place. The amount of traffic Reddit generates is completely absurd, and is itself part of the problem.
It is not that people don't know about what is happening at Reddit, or even that they don't care about it, it's just that there is no replacement for it. I still have to use Reddit, because there are two communities on there that I need to look at sometimes and they don't really exist elsewhere.
We don't have the digg or MySpace situation where users just abandon ship and go elsewhere. These companies are behemoths. Voat was entertaining the idea of Twitter disappearing a while ago, didn't happen. This current Facebook scandal is like a fly on the windshield for them. Celebrities, media, entire communities etc. have populated these platforms en masse, and it will take an act of god for them to be replaced with something else.