IMO, I don’t see reddit ever going back to what it was even a year ago. Like many other lurkers I didn’t actively post much on reddit, but I used it a ton for searches. Reddit was (and still is to a much lesser extent) a great place to find support or posts that might address an obscure problem you have with tech in general. Trying that today gives me mixed results at best. Subs are private or the replies that were helpful are now deleted. A lot of the search results that you might’ve found before don’t actually show up because the user deleted their account and/or posts. Its far less useful for this purpose than it was even a few months ago and I think we’ll see traffic start to reflect that pretty soon.
I used to get what I needed from BBSs. Then it was AOL boards and Usenet. Then Slashdot. Then Reddit.
People want to gather. There will always be another community.
This is a very short-sighted way of looking at things. The real crunch will come on June 30th when the third party apps stop working. That will cause many people to switch away from Reddit or at least reduce their usage. Also, the current shenaigans will have a long term negative effect on the quality of moderation and thus the quality of content. And people will think twice about putting a lot of effort into producing content. They’ve been on a downward slope in this regard for a long time but this will only accelerate it.
I’d like to think this is true, but I think it remains to be seen. It may end up being that most users end up deciding to just accept the new normal and reddit pretty much weathers this storm without enough blowback to make a difference.
That is a possibility. I hope it’ll turn out differently. But basically I’m done with Reddit. My main hope is that kbin/lemmy become viable alternatives.
Several communities have been effectively nuked by the mods changing rules and/or setting the subs to NSFW (with actual NSFW following that move).
Unless Reddit rolls them back to what they were 2-3 weeks ago (which might be a possibility), I’m not sure if there’s any going back.
Yep, I agree. It’ll be a slow decline, but I think we’ll see one. It’s kind of like a boss being hit by a bunch of DOT’s. Seems fine at first, won’t keel over right away, but as time passes, the amount of health loss will get more and more catastrophic until it becomes overwhelming.
Many subs reopened but they’re still protesting in very creative ways.
User traffic back to normal means people are now posting as much as before, it doesn’t mean reddit itself is back to normal, unless you consider spamming Oliver pictures everywhere, literal steam on r/steam. all users “promoted” to mods, NSFW content where it shouldn’t be, etc, as being “normal”.
I’d be much more interested in knowing how all this is affecting ad revenues and investors opinions, but it seems this kind of info is really hard to find.
Are advertisers backing off for example, realizing that porn could pop up unexpectedly in subs they sell their ads in? Are investors realizing reddit is a very risky business, not only because users can protest any time, but also because they showed they can literally crash the entire platform?
Another dip in traffic will occur when apps stop working July 1st, after that I believe things will go slowly back to normal, “real” normal this time.
Many users are already migrating to alternatives, but I believe it will take quite a long time before the masses realize reddit is a sinking ship.
Honestly, the masses can go ahead and stay there. We have plenty of people here now to have a functioning community without all the Facebook-esque crap those masses dragged in when they joined. I want the small reddit from 10 years ago. This is much closer to that and I’d like it to stay that way.
I agree, my point is that as long as the masses stay there, reddit will appear fine, garbage to us obviously but I think we are a minority of the reddit userbase.
It’ll take a bit before they realize the subs they liked are turning into garbage
This. Reddit is going a Reddit thing right now with quirky protests. It’s fun. It’s engaging.
But Reddit is actively making its website and its apps worse. They’re not profitable, and they know launching an IPO while in the red is going to make them less money than if they’re in the black. They’re going to try and squeeze that extra value out of users.
Spez has been making shit decisions because the company’s backers want to move quickly to sell. They no longer seeing their investments pan out over the longer term, and now seems like the best time to get off of this train. The curent AI hype means that they can pitch Reddit’s business model as a mix of ads and selling their backlog of user content for language model training.
But he’s also been making shit decisions because he’s believed that Redditors are a captive audience. That they have nowhere else to go. That’s exactly what it looked like 3 weeks ago.
That is no longer true. There are now multiple active alternatives for people. None of them need to have 50 million people on them, they just need content, and that content is starting to flow. This means Reddit isn’t sticky anymore. People will move away over time as they further enshitify the site.
Reddit hasn’t been shot in the head. It won’t die immediately. It has cancer.
Reddit hasn’t been shot in the head. It won’t die immediately. It has cancer.
Great analogy. Reddit is also like someone with a serious addiction. In this case, to money. They’re going to keep making stupid decisions because they’ve got to have that money, and not just “enough” but more and more and they’ll screw you over to get it. You’ll forgive them once or twice. You’ll try to talk them out of it. You’ll get their friends involved. You’ll tell them all that they’re throwing away. But they’ve got to have more money. Ultimately you have to give up on them for your own sanity. They’ll still be wandering around town, stinking and ridiculed and talking to themselves, doing anything no matter how degrading for just a little bit more money. Eventually you’ll just pretend you never knew them.
I’ll be interested in this data once the apps stop working. How many people really use those apps and how will it change the data? There doesn’t seem to be any going back if Spez is to be believed, so we’ll find out at the end of the month.
I thought they said only about 3% of users use the apps.
Well i’m here now. That’s what matters to me
Well MySpace didn’t go out in one month. I was a straggler there until about 2008, when I just abandoned the account. I hated Facebook’s interface when it came out, and their later privacy controversies secured that opinion for me.
To be fair the alternative still has a way to go.
Disappointing but expected.
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Probably a PCMag puff piece placed by a marketing firm for Reddit. Happens a lot.
I think that was pretty much expected and in line with last years Twitter migration
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Not sure. Some subs feel normal. It is hard to switch…
Reddit would go dying slowly because nowadays in Reddit there are no one who wants Reddit app to be more useful (such ones are already emigrate to here fediverse).
We just have to keep building up this community so people can continue migrating.
