Yesterday I read the excellent article by Cory Doctorow: Let the Platforms Burn and this particular anecdote The thing is, network effects are a double-edged sword. People join a service to be with the people they care about. But when the people they care about start to leave, everyone rushes for the exits. Here’s danah [...]
I suspect what the article is describing is actually happening, but I’m curious how the writer a couple of quotes deep goes about identifying “emotionally sticky nodes”. They are using verbiage that makes it sound like they are describing something objective, but I have my doubts.
The article does kind of define it, but does a poor job.
An emotionally sticky node is a user who makes other users stay on the site. Examples of this for Reddit would be accounts like poem_for_your_sprog, ShittyWatercolor, Shittymorph, or wil.
There are others, of course, that you may not be able to name - /r/California was mostly kept alive by /u/BlankVerse, who posted 85% of all the articles to that subreddit. You’d never notice unless you paid attention to usernames. Similarly, a small percentage of people made a large percentage of Reddit’s OC. Typically you couldn’t name them, either, but you’d know if they weren’t there because they gave Reddit a soul.
Reddit started off as a bunch of bots reposting links they found, without even a comment section. Eventually real people came and started posting nerd stuff (like programming articles) alongside the bots. Enough of a critical mass was created that a comment section was added, making old Reddit look like what HackerNews or Tildes look like today. The programming and porn were sent to different subsections of the site for the people who don’t want to see such things (these became the first subreddits). The default subreddits were slowly created, then anyone could make their own subreddits for their own topics.
Still, it was largely posts to things found elsewhere. People went to Reddit as part of their trip through several other websites, and they’d usually gather what they found and repost it to Reddit. By the early 2010s, a lot of the pictures on Reddit were mainly 4chan reposts. People who had a lot of stuff saved from other sites were the “emotionally sticky nodes” and people would come to Reddit to see stuff that was explicitly gathered from everywhere else.
Advice Animals sprung from 4chan memes and really started to take off. Over time, Reddit started making their own native advice animal formats and thus we started to really see OC on Reddit for the first time - not just reposts, but new content you couldn’t see elsewhere. Soon these people became the “emotionally sticky nodes”, keeping users on the site.
And, of course, there are other things who were “emotionally sticky” without necessarily posting memes. Reddit became a great place to aggregate news at-a-glance. This is because of the moderation of the news and politics subreddits, ensuring that things posted to their subs were actual articles and not random YouTube videos or self-posts or images or whatever. Good moderation meant that you could go to /r/news or /r/worldnews and get the same effect as looking at the headlines of a newspaper. Similarly, the 2012 election had /r/politics become a great source of information and discussion about the US Presidental Race. These sorts of things made Reddit a useful site and kept people coming back.
Even now, Reddit still has “emotionally sticky” places. They could be individual users like the ones I mentioned above, or they could be entire subreddits that aren’t quite captured here on Lemmy yet. Reddit is still a good place to go for updates about Ukraine (although it is starting to falter a bit). NCD hasn’t really made its way over to Lemmy properly yet, either. There are oodles of niche communities that you’ve never heard of, and people who don’t want to leave their niche community because it doesn’t have any activity over here.
That said, some places absolutely have made the jump successfully (196). But for most places there’s a while to go before Reddit gets to the point where it can’t maintain itself as a site.