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Comment by Underqualified | Hacker News Reader

I've seen UseNet die, so I'm not so sure. What Reddit does (and UseNet before it) is really niche. There aren't as many people on Reddit as there are on Facebook and Reddit isn't as entangled with people's 'real' life as much as social media is.

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You are right with your last sentence, but reddit is anything but niche. It attracts even politicians and other celebrities, albeit typically only for Q&As. Arnold Schwarzenegger and William Shattner post there for fun with their real names, who knows how many post under pseudonyms. The beauty of reddit is that it attracts even non-technical people who share their insight in their domain (usually anonymous, so to be taken with a grain of salt - but it's usually plausible precisely because reddit is so popular).

Reddit has grown significantly the last few years, but it still has only about 50-60 million daily users, compared to Facebook's nearly 2 billion daily users.

Don't get me wrong, I like Reddit. Before it I used Usenet, which died and after Usenet I was active on forums (most of those also seem to be gone now). I really prefer those topic based social media to the other user-based social media. But I've seen enough of them die before.

I loved Usenet before the mixture of web forums and spam killed it... we need something like this again - decentralised platforms without decentralised community.

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