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. They'd usually gather what they found during that trip and repost it to Reddit. OC wasn't expected; reposts were encouraged. 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 - hence why Reddit was the "frontpage of the internet", an aggregate of what people had found elsewhere.
Eventually we started to see OC for the first time. Advice Animals sprung from 4chan memes and really started to go viral across Reddit. Reddit users started making their own native advice animal formats and now Reddit was no longer just "things from elsewhere on the internet" but new content you couldn't see elsewhere. Soon these people making OC 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, post names were real headlines (no editorializing!), and the page wasn't littered with random YouTube videos or self-posts or images or whatever. Good moderation meant that you could go to /r/news or /r/worldnews and trust that you were getting 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/Kbin yet. Neither Lemmy nor Kbin have great mod tools, and a lot of mod teams here are inexperienced and not as aggressive as Reddit mod teams are. You can argue this is a good thing, but aggressive moderation really matters for places like the news communities where legitimacy comes from users avoiding editorializing. This means that these places aren't a good replacement for Reddit (yet) - subreddits where moderation is important are still "emotionally sticky" because nothing can compete with them. (This is why it's important that Lemmy develop good mod teams and good mod tools!)
There are oodles of niche communities that you've never heard of that haven't come over, either - for example, !modeltrains (@modeltrains) and https://lemmy.world/c/nscalemodeltrains are niche communities on Reddit, but neither of their fediverse counterparts have much activity (other than me). People on Reddit thus don't want to leave their niche community because it doesn't have any activity over here, and because there's no activity over here, nobody wants to come over here to start activity - meaning there's no activity over here. That's why it's important to make sure you contribute often to niche communities you care about, even if your content isn't "good" - there needs to be something to lure emotionally sticky nodes here and get people to jump over.
That said, some places absolutely have made the jump successfully (https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/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.
Looks like r/programming discovered the astroturfing, so in true Reddit fashion they simply shut down the subreddit entirely to avoid the spread of negative public sentiment. Thanks for galvanizing my resolve to migrate to the fediverse, Spez
It's like the home goods version of fast fashion. Unfortunately, a lot of the products on temu are the same Chinese made products you will find elsewhere at a higher markup. Especially if you still buy from Amazon. It's kinda annoying to see people turn their nose up at temu but happily buy JABXBSJ or whatever weird ass Chinese company name products on Amazon.
Hell, even if you're buying expensive ass home decor or clothes a lot of it is cheap stuff made by workers paid poorly in shit conditions.
Buying used has become the only moral option at this point. There's still a few products made in the US that are worth the money, but a lot of ones that used to be popular have moved their manufacturing to other countries now also.
This article kind of misses the forest for the trees. While I agree with many of the author's points, that's not why the #TwitterMigration failed. It failed because Twitter/Mastodon isn't really a social networking site, and Mastodon didn't provide the same service that Twitter does. At its core, Twitter is about small numbers of (usually famous or important) users communicating with large audiences of followers. #TwitterMigration failed because not enough of those famous and important people moved from Twitter to Mastodon, so the average user had no content they cared to read. Seeing posts from your friends about what they had for dinner last night is all well and good, but the stuff people actually want to see is famous person A throwing shade at famous person B while famous person C talks about the new movie they're in and important organization D posts a warning about severe weather in the area. You don't go to Twitter to have discussions, you go to Twitter to get news and gossip direct from the source.
In contrast, sites like Reddit and kBin/Lemmy are about having group conversations around a topic. Interacting with famous people is neat but not the point. Think of Reddit/kBin/Lemmy as random conversations at a party whereas Twitter/Mastodon is some random person on the corner shouting to a crowd from a soapbox. #RedditMigration has a much better chance of succeeding simply because the purpose of the site is different. As long as enough people move to kBin/Lemmy to have meaningful conversations (aka content), it will have succeeded.
To all the folks saying that reddit couldn't replace the mods, that it was too big an effort, that they couldn't run a big sub all by themselves, I have only one thing to say to you.
TIHI was a fairly large sub, with almost multimilion level of subscribers. If reddit wanted to increase traffic and get more eyes on ads, they're doing quite a terrible job of it so far.
And who are they going to have take over mod responsibilities (for free) in all of these communities at once? This is why mods need to call their bluff and force them to try to replace them.
That's what Narwhal dev had publicly offered previously, there's no firm confirmation that's actually the deal and I'd be a little surprised if it was.
I think Reddit chose to give them a sweetheart deal because they're the worst competitor app, the dev had been least publicly critical of the API changes, and Reddit wants the PR value of an example case "proving" their API changes weren't maliciously anticompetitive towards third-party apps.
The fact that Narwhal has struck a deal now allows Reddit Inc to say "see! we do work with third party apps; it's not that we're bad, it's that RIF and Apollo are big meanies who won't cooperate!"
Don't forget that the API won't provide access to any NSFW sub. (There's a lot of reasons a sub might have NSFW posts besides just pr0n.) So Reddit literally expects people to pay for less content. It's absolutely bananas...
"the amount of time people spent on the Reddit website by close to 16% between June 12 and 13" - what does that mean?
In the article, the full sentence is,
That "blackout" movement, which briefly caused Reddit to go down, dropped daily traffic by about 7% and the amount of time people spent on the Reddit website by close to 16% between June 12 and 13, according to the data shared by web traffic analysis firm Similarweb.
So basically the amount of time people spent on reddit dropped 16% between June 12 and June 13.
"Web traffic of the platform also declined to about 52 million" - 52 million ?
Yeah that could be worded better. No units. Resumably it's about the number of visits.
Again, the full sentence is,
Web traffic of the platform also declined to about 52 million on June 13, compared with averaging nearly 56 million in the days prior.
While the technology shows promise, early testers have found that it falls short of a well-known search trick: adding "reddit" to the end of queries. Instead of directing readers to sites targeting SEO traffic, this straightforward technique draws on the knowledge of Reddit's community to provide actual help from forum...
To that end, Google recently unveiled a new feature called Perspectives, which aims to surface discussion forums and videos from various social media platforms, including TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, and Quora.
Google used to have this years ago. It was just a search toggle called "discussions" and it would prioritize search results from forums, comments, reddit, etc. It was extremely useful to find real information while avoiding SEO blogspam ad platforms, which is why they removed it in the first place.
Reddit is a dead site running (dbzer0.com)
Reddit seems to be scrambling behind the scenes to try and limit the effects of the migration. Damage control: ChatGPT bots are spamming pro-admin, astroturfed comments (i.imgur.com)
Apologies if this is a repost. They’re scared lol....
r/ZeroWaste mod talks about ongoing "plague of bots" spamming comments at an extremely high rate (media.kbin.social)
Op-ed: Why the great #TwitterMigration didn’t quite pan out (arstechnica.com)
Things to think about and lessons to learn.
r/TIHI has been banned for being unmoderated. (old.reddit.com)
As Apollo and other apps close down, Narwhal seemingly agrees to one-off deal with Reddit to stay in business (9to5mac.com)
Reddit protest plunges user engagement, site activity and ad portal visits (techcrunch.com)
Reddit protest by its community moderators has impacted user engagements, traffic and visits to its ad portal since its beginning on June 12.
Google thinks its new Perspectives tab will finally get you to stop adding 'Reddit' to searches (www.androidpolice.com)
While the technology shows promise, early testers have found that it falls short of a well-known search trick: adding "reddit" to the end of queries. Instead of directing readers to sites targeting SEO traffic, this straightforward technique draws on the knowledge of Reddit's community to provide actual help from forum...