Title says it all. If you think Reddit’s been trending down lately, just wait.
It’s worse than that, when this all started I had a look at their Wikipedia entry. They have 2000 employees across 5 locations. What in the ever loving Christ are they all doing if that app is the best they can do?
Most of them are either admins (read: global moderators to enforce site wide policy) and “community builders” that spam subreddits with reposts and junk to boost activity. Some of that spam was malicious bots of course, but a lot was also from reddit themselves. That’s why the site appears as active as it is with so many content creators leaving.
Their development team is probably very small.
Jesus it sounds like they took a look at /r/subredditsimulator and thought, “hey let’s make the whole site like that”.
I mean what do you think they were doing for all those years? I still remember when r/subredditsimulator would frequently pop up on the front page because of some of the ridiculous and funny things the AI language models would post. But eventually over time as they learned to mimic typical user posts, it got to a point where it was a clone of every other sub on the site and everyone sort of forgot about it. So I honestly would not doubt for a second that they’ve spread them out to numerous subs and are using them as content creators to try and keep subs appearing active.
This sounds really dumb, but the “activity” is primarily what draws new users and keeps existing ones. The primary complaint/desire of new Lemmy users is more/sustained activity on the platform. That’s also what keeps people using Twitter and other SM platforms.
For a company approaching an IPO, increasing amd sustaining activity from real users is maybe the second most important thing to do, second only to showing a clear route to monetization. It doesnt surprise me their team may be mostly admin and “community builders”, but it does surprise me that they’d risk loosing major contributors and moderators without a clear replacement.
