next inline with Slashdot and digg
If they survive IPO and the shits storm that will bring, It will be the porn ban. We all know someone with a big wallet is going to push the change eventually.
I think the new preferential treatment in Googles algo will cancel out people leaving due to content getting stale.
This is honestly what I expect to happen. Once the porn is banned, people will stop going there. It has a lot of info for obscure communities and tech communities, but eventually that will start to move to other places.
So, I guess it will slowly die out.
IPO -> billionaire purchase -> enshittification -> never dies but sucks forever
Repeat until the entire internet is a dusty smelly unkempt nursing home where orderlies occasionally kick you in the ribs. I have seen the future and this is it.
It gets bought by a different company (possible through majority share acquisition), the new company makes a lot of changes (removing NSFW communities, etc) triggering stronger protests than the API changes because it affects more users.
When the CEO gets in a tiff with Google or Microsoft and starts blocking scraping for indexers. At some point someone in charge is going to get pissed off that search engines include significant text extracts of answers baked into their results (which is valid, we really need to crack down on how abusive Google is to the internet at large) and launch a lawsuit or two to block Google from including Reddit results in responses.
Once that happens all the valuable long term information on Reddit will be lost (there’s absolutely no chance Reddit can build a decent search engine given how deeply unprofitable it is) and the site will be truly dead.
I never understood this. They were sitting on a mountain of data. It’s maybe a masters project or at maximum a PhD to build a search engine from it. That’s 60k a year, for 3 years, max. How did they have no interest in building their own search?
Itll slowly bleed out users to a number of alternative forms of social media and become functionally irrelevant like Slashdot. Still alive but in the same way someone with most of their brain turned to fluid and kept alive on life support.
One thing I just saw is new tools for brands. This doesn’t say so, but I could imagine them allowing brands to pay to post on subreddits against the will of the moderators.
If they do that, or turn off old.reddit, I think they’ll drive away many of the core users who make communities there valuable (those who didn’t leave after the API debacle).
fade away quietly like Digg
Social media deaths are so slow and monotonous. I’m expecting something similar to Twitter and even Tumblr, where eventually it ends up in the hands of the only manchild CEO willing to touch it, and they start chasing users away personally.
I know you said it but it’s not going to die completely. Hell, MySpace is still around.
By being bought by another company which then proceeds to discontinue it.
So, Google is going to buy it?
Same way reddit died for me; the front page was literally nothing but neo-nazi rage bait.
Well, they reached out to me (and many others on-platform) to buy shares in their IPO. Something-something contributor something.
Anyway, no VC worth half their salt will leave money on the table letting essentially the public buy equity at the same price as them.
So that’s not a healthy sign for them.
Same. I was sent that email and deleted it. A bunch of garbage.
It’s predatory garbage – I’ve had some VCs as customers and I guarantee that if the IPO was expected to do well, they would not leave a dime on the table for contributors. Generally if you don’t know who the bag-holder in these schemes is… chances are it’s you!
I still help out people on Reddit, because a lot of foreigners don’t know how to do things in my country (e.g. find medication they need) and that’s where they ask. If it vanishes tomorrow, I don’t really care though, haha.
It’s already dead to me.
