It's understandable to be defeatist about the recent Reddit protests. The recent subreddit blackouts weren't 100% popular and similar attempts to migrate away from Twitter have hit road bumps. The network effect of giant platforms seem insurmountable, but giants have fallen before and will continue to do so. Having some recent experience in the industry, I wanted to give a fact-based analysis and answer to: how do you kill a giant and what does it look like when it falls?
If you're confused about what's happening on Reddit, check out this link.
To start, I want to talk about "migrations" from platforms, and how they often aren't what they seem. It's easy to think of these giants dying overnight, because to us they essentially do. One day, we visited MySpace or Digg for the last time, and then never looked back. However, the data says otherwise: killing a giant takes time.
In 2010, Digg introduced v4 which completely changed the UI and added a lot of features that users hated. In hindsight, this was the downturn for Digg, but at the time, the story was a bit more complicated.
After the launch of v4, Digg traffic did drop dramatically. However, one year after launch, Digg still had 8.5 million monthly US visitors compared to Reddit's 13.7 million monthly US vistors. According to traffic estimates, Reddit traffic didn't surpass Digg traffic until December 2011 over one year later after v4's launch.
Similarly, Facebook surpassed MySpace in unique visitors from the US in 2009, but MySpace still had 36 million users in 2013. The data says the same thing: giants take time to fall.
At the time, it's very likely that people visited both Reddit and Digg at the same time. At the end of the day, the people that continued to visit Digg did not end up saving Digg. If and when Reddit begins falling, checking it out a few times a day won't save it either.
Also, when Digg's traffic fell, Reddit traffic did not rise the same amount. A lot of people who disliked Digg's change simply moved on altogether, they didn't move to Reddit (it was a bit of a hard sell for some). Ultimately, Reddit didn't succeed Digg by attracting all the old Digg users, but by building their own community with their own users.
So how do you attract your own users? Successful platforms build a beachhead with a niche. Reddit was the underdog focused on tech, and Facebook was the underdog for college students. The competitor needs to be "the" place for some community. A great example of this is Discord, where for certain niches "the" community exists only on Discord.
Eventually, once a large enough network effect is established and Reddit continues to implement habit-breaking changes on their platform, people will start to choose and recommend the alternative option over Reddit. Thus the giant dies.
One corollary to building a niche, is that cargo-culting Reddit will likely not work. That is to say, simply creating the same communities from Reddit in your new alternative and hoping the content creators come is not a winning strategy. Community needs to be grown organically, and simply copying Reddit will not work.
Similarly, I don't think you need to have an exact feature match to kill Reddit. You see this a lot when discussing the Reddit alternatives: "Oh I'd use it if it has a mobile app," "oh I'd use it if it looks more like Reddit." If you have the community people will come, and they will get over the fact that you don't have a mobile app. If you don't have the community, no amount of cool features will get people to come over and stay.