That’s a recent quote from Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler. Here’s more of it: This week, Reddit has been telling protesting moderators that if they keep their communities private, the company will take action against them. Any actions could happen as soon as this afternoon.
Reddit will die off in stages. Slowly.
First the power users are leaving now. These are the mods and the major content creators (think Minecraft leaving)
Eventually they will piss people off again and the more common content creators will leave.
Then after reddit has worse and worse content, the users who just comment will leave.
After that there will be nothing worthwhile for the lurkers and they will leave too.
Reddit will then be a wasteland.
This will all take quite a while. Even Digg took time to die off.
I think the growth of Lemmy over the last few weeks is a clear indicator that Reddit is in decline. I have deleted Apollo and my reddit bookmark and have only gone back when a Google search provided the information I needed. I won’t be going back and I think a lot of people are of the same mind.
Unfortunately for me, one of my favorite uses for reddit has been live game threads for various sports and that really only works with a larger user base. For instance, I follow the Seattle Mariners and I have found two different Lemmy instances for them. The one with the most subscribers (44) hasn’t had a game thread posted in 13 days despite the Mariners having played like 10 games in that stretch. The other one has 9 subscribers, although it looks like someone has set up a bot to automatically post a game thread and a post-game thread; however, every single one I looked at has 0 comments.
I’m not gonna be able to pull the plug on reddit entirely until Lemmy gets a serious increase in users.
Hi! I’m an admin of fanaticus.social. I’d like to apologize for the game bots disappearance. It’s back now! I made pinned a post about it, which you can read here.
We’re working hard to iron out the kinks in the game bots but I apologize for the inconvenience. I was on vacation last week and because of a bug, the choice was between keeping the fanaticus servers up or putting the bots to sleep.
The live game threads were some of my favorite parts of Reddit too. I can’t do anything about the small user base but porting the game bots over to lemmy and posting content is the best way I could think of to start attracting users.
As a person who really gets stuck in his ways and hates having to change things if I don’t have to, here I am on Lemmy. I’m ready to settle in.
I’m surprised I’ve been able to transition over to non-Reddit browsing again so quickly, after how much of my time was taken up by browsing on Reddit. I don’t think I want to find another site that takes up as much of my time as Reddit did again. I want to go back to the old internet of random wanderings, and not get spoon fed content from a single source.
Yeah Digg didn’t die in a day. It takes time. I joined lemmy today, but I looked into it a few weeks ago first. It wasn’t worth the effort then, it is now. Having an Apollo-like app is a big help too.
Every previous major exodus had the problem that it was the people everyone was better off without leaving. Maybe you hated Reddit in 2015 and were pissed at their decisions, but the alternative was a place dedicated to mocking fat people and saying slurs.
Comparatively lemmy just kinda has a similar vibe to Reddit. Like I need to look for equivalents to some spaces I miss, but it’s not the people we said good riddance to
It’s been fascinating to watch the corporate web ecosystem that rose in the late 2000s slowly start to collapse.
I’m not sure if Reddit will “die off”. There seems to be a significant portion of users who don’t care about the API debacle or protests - they just want to scroll through memes.
I would definitely like to see Reddit experience more pain, given how cunty they’ve been to users and moderators. But we live in a world where big companies act like shit and get away with it.
When I’ve checked the Reddit home page in the last few days (using an ad blocker of course, or sometimes an alternative Reddit front-end), it looks like stuff is still being posted.
Hopefully Reddit will feel more pain that persuades it to change course at least a little bit. But I won’t believe that the pain is happening until I see it. Unfortunately it seems to me that there are some Reddit users who just want to watch the funny videos and don’t care about Reddit’s poor behaviour.
The comment is from last September, completely unrelated to what’s happening now on the platform.
Reddit is too big to fail, they have achieved critical mass. Keep in mind facebook is still around despite being a reviled company, and instagram certainly hasn’t had a mass migration off of the platform either.
At the end of the day Lemmy isn’t a replacement to reddit yet. It depends entirely upon it getting traction which thus far still hasn’t occurred - we are not at critical mass yet. I hope it happens but there are many reasons why this site could fail even after reddit’s admin blunders. Too many people are apathetic to the changes and not all of them are lurkers who do not post or comment.
Today you can’t just stop using reddit either, especially for google searches. Too much content is ONLY on reddit. It’s a huge problem. We really need a wikipedia style reddit where it’s not for profit and still moderated for content.
Facebook may not have failed, but it’s a shell of the platform that it was. Twitter is on the way to that status, Tumblr did it to their users and it’s happened time after time. The little bit I’ve browsed the front page of reddit in the last little bit there’s been a noticeable drop in post and comment quality.
I know there’s a few reddit archive projects, and it may be worth looking into a project that could scrape the html and present the info without it being Reddit.
You think facebook is dying? their monthly active users have grown year over year every year so far. It slowed down approaching 3 billion but still grows. https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/
Twitter’s user count by comparison is a joke, 368m in 2022, but as of current statistics they have only ever grown despite doom and gloom over the changes. I always hated twitter, but the facts are what they are. They do predict a decline of the platform but it’s far from an abandonment. Since twitter is now private it’s unlikely we’ll get great data from them moving forward. https://www.statista.com/statistics/303681/twitter-users-worldwide/
Reddit doesn’t have equivalency statistics since it’s always been private. Best I can find places it somewhere between 800m and 1.6 billion monthly active users. Way bigger than twitter and honestly given that lemmy has yet to break 0.01 billion MAU i’m not convinced lemmy will succeed or not. I’m obviously here because I want it to, i’m just not drinking anybody’s koolaid because I wish things to be a certain way regardless of reality.
I don’t think reddit will go anywhere, i’m just not using it anymore.
Yes, reddit will always retain some user base and they might even continue to grow. But the quality will be worse. Just like Facebook and other social media platforms, there will be users that simply don’t care enough to look for alternatives. I really hope that it will be a downward spiral for them. Too many (contributing) core users leaving, moderation getting worse and spammers and karma farmers reducing the quality of posts to a point where it’s just too cumbersome to scroll through all the crap to find a worthy post. I think that reddit either reverses its decision or that it will slowly fade into meaninglessness…
This is also my take. Reddit today is very different from DIGG 10 years ago, in that for a majority of users, their experience of USING the site will not change. These users access the site normally, or even with an ad blocker, but that’s about it. For them, nothing has changed.
What’s left is a vocal, but powerful minority. Reddit Enhancement Suite for desktop users won’t notice a change at all, until Reddit decides to do otherwise. Same with old.reddit. 3rd Party app users are the only ones FORCED to use something different: Official app, Desktop, or leave/move to Lemmy/Kbin. Reddit will still keep going, but the overall quality and usefulness will decline. Spez is betting that this will be enough to survive, and he’s probably right. Their valuation can tank all they want but it’s still in the Billions from what I last saw.
The quality has been dropping for years and years. I miss reddit from a decade ago, when niche little community things could happen leaving waves across the site.
Now we just get a ton of the same things over and over, hardcore advertising and mass manipulation. It’s no longer the tiny little site nobody knew about but is instead the big focus for all the businesses out there that think there’s a market to be had. Plus there’s the herd mentality that always comes from giant populations on a platform.
Don’t get me wrong, there are still niche communities but they just don’t have the same flavor of cohesion that they did in earlier times.
lol nah Reddit can fail. Just like Tumblr, and Digg, and MySpace, and LiveJournal, and GeoCities, and the list goes on. Reddit relies on volunteer work to provide its content, and just like when Digg tried to do almost the same thing, the community will move on. It always does. It has since the 80s and will until the extinction of humanity or the collapse of civilization.
Let it fail.
Facebook rebranded to Meta and burned $13 billion on the “metaverse” to stay relevant. So, Facebook doesn’t seem to think that Facebook will be around forever. Reddit does have critical mass, which is an advantage for them. There’s no denying that. But, it’s their advantage to waste by being overly aggressive and greedy, which they seem to be happy to do.
As for Google searches, it might be less that Reddit is so valuable for search and more that Google has become so bad at providing good search results that Reddit became the go between. There’s a lot of very specific knowledge on Reddit, but there’s also a lot of redirects from Reddit comments to outside sources that have the info that a Google search should be able to provide. I don’t know if Google has the will to fix that problem though. If Reddit can “get back to normal” and continue being Google’s sidekick, Google might be happy to return to the status quo. But, once a company like Reddit adopts the policy that “the beatings will continue until morale improves,” it’s hard to imagine how they can get back to “normal.”
At some point it’ll be easier for Google to buy reddit for the content than to unfuck their own search engine. Bonus points because they can tell themselves they fixed it for good and keep making google search even shittier.
I have wondered if some of the big players interested in AI might decide to buy or recreate (again) something like Reddit so that they just have the data and control it. Google owns Youtube, so they are already managing the liability that comes with moderating a social media platform.
Digg had critical mass. It went down in flames.
It doesn’t take bajillions of users to generate enough content to form a reasonable alternative.
Niche subreddits will be hard to recreate though unfortunately, but plenty of time to grow. And long-term, federated seems like a good model so that once these communities are rebuilt they aren’t at the mercy a company who’s main concern is short-term profits.
Too big to fail doesn’t mean it’s too big to decline.
I don’t think reddit is going anywhere as a company and a platform, for a while at least. But that doesn’t mean it can’t lose a good share of it’s users to competitors.
I don’t think the comparison with Facebook is a valid one though. Primarily because Facebook is a “true” social media platform. You have your friends and family on it which creates a very strong network effect.
Reddit on the other hand is primarily a content aggregation platform. I don’t need to convince my friends and family to switch from it.
Additionally, Facebook is a lot more successful than Reddit financially. They make disproportionately more money per user due to having very targeted advertising. They own other platforms like Instagram and whatsapp. Unlike reddit, Facebook doesn’t need to concern itself with having financial troubles.
A better comparison would be tumbler, which was quite big and while it still exists, it’s a shell of its former self.
This is the most level-headed take. Reddit is going to continue to slog along with or without my account, with or without Lemmy’s 53k active users. Anyone who thinks this protest is going to sink them entirely is naive.
However, they may stagger along as an enshittified website that has lost it’s spirit and never meaningfully grows again. Reddit is still better than any other alternative at this point in time, but Reddit is not by my estimation going to improve again. It’s all downhill. So I’m doing my part and trying to work to build community elsewhere.
We don’t need 50MM users to reach a mass where the content is fresh and engaging all the time. Probably a fraction of that would be. Lemmy’s userbase is double Squabbles and there is already a noticeable difference in content.
Yep. I think people need to think about what “failure” means in this context. Reddit isn’t going to go away, and honestly the “default” experience - what you see when you just visit the homepage - isn’t likely to change much at all IMO.
The thing is I haven’t liked the default reddit experience for many years. The draw of reddit was that they could do all their crappy changes to the default-level site and it still left the niche discussion-based communities to their own devices.
Now they’ve affected those communities, which is why I’m here. But I’m well aware that a great majority of reddit’s userbase uses reddit to doomscroll through endless insipid bot-generated meme lists. None of that is going to change. People like me who care about the small places that will be impacted are in a very small minority compared to the overall userbase of reddit.
So reddit will fail (or has failed) for my use case, certainly. But I’m under no illusion that it will cease to exist.
I feel like I’m being repetitive, but yes your point that the Reddit popular/all front pages won’t be dramatically affected is spot on. Those are where a huge amount of passive users spend their time, and the posts there have been trash and reposts for years now.
The quality content enjoyed by many people who jumped ship was never showing up on the front page anyway. I made numerous original content posts that gained a lot of traction relative to the niche subreddit it was in, but my 3K upvoted quality content was never going to compete for popular/all space with a 50k upvoted repost of a repost of TikTok video.
I did notice, when I visited Reddit desktop today that r/popular has a lot of political posts, despite one of popular’s reasons for existing to be a non-political alternative to r/all. I wonder if that’s something that’s crept in over time and I never noticed, or if that’s the result of losing so many subreddits that politics had to backfill popular though.
The sad thing is that the masses that are still on Reddit at this point dgaf and will likely stay on Reddit forever. There’s a real problem of Apathy in today’s culture when people are just jonesing for their fix of daily content/memes, or at the very least nothing that disrupts the status quo. They don’t give a fuck about “ideals” or what corporations do or farm from them so long as their instant gratification and daily intake of said content remains unchanged.
Reddit will REALLY be good when those apathetic users are all that’s left to produce content and moderate subs! /s
Let’s be honest, reddit had already gentrified itself internally into subs that either
A) act like mob rule is cool
or
B) so libertarian it hurts
The B users can’t stand A and the A users can’t stand B, sadly, the A users are the ones who only care about “content” and don’t care about much else.
I think you overestimate the willingness of people to stay in a Spam, porn, and bot infested hellhole (if you think it’s bad now you haven’t seen nothing yet), especially as public consciousness starts to realize that. There will be a point in the future where Reddit will be seen as about as respectable as an adult video site, there are people who would be willing to stay through that but there are plenty of people who wouldn’t either.
Another good thing to remember is that most of the people on Reddit are the kind of people who laugh and upvote stuff, they’re not the kind of people who are going to be making high quality posts. So when the people making high quality content leave the only thing that will be left is the lowest common denominator. It doesn’t really bode well for the continued survival of the platform, at least as a place that people are going to want to go.
People just need to change their attitude for how they interact with Reddit now. Gone are the days of good faith and honest interaction. I’ll happily lurk and absorb content and provide no interaction back, not wasting my time curating / generating content for them anymore.
Moderators need to understand that Reddit doesn’t care if you’ve been in charge of your /sub for 10 years. They have, can and will tell you how to run it. There’s nothing for you to “negotiate.” As far as Reddit management is concerned, it’s “my way or the highway.”
Part of ending a toxic relationship is figuring out that it’s time to let go.
Well, we former Reddit mods don’t need to understand anything in that regard. Fuck Reddit in its entirety. I’m not wasting time considering their point of view. I understand that they’re pieces of shit. I did negotiate - they doubled down and so I carried through and walked the fuck away, revoked my registered copyrighted material and took the first steps to litigation when they reposted it.
