I have to say, well written article (too bad they only mentioned Beehaw and not Lemmin). Reddit cannot exist without user content and more importantly the moderators who do a hard job for free.
Without moderators, subreddits simply become a free for all, the far west.
Five days ago I wrote Reddit’s future is exactly one of:
- They reverse their changes
- Their CEO resigns and they reverse their changes
- Within a week the site is no longer relevant, having completed a #Digg as everyone leaves
Looks like we’re going for option #3.
Due respect but that is hella optimistic. None of that is going to happen. Reddit is huge. During digg’s downfall, their traffic plummeted by 33% in a month. Reddit’s traffic went down only 6% during the height of the blackouts and is already pretty much back to normal.
I don’t think it’s going to disappear overnight like Digg. I think the most likely situation is Reddit loses a lot of the unique communities, but ultimately they’ll keep the memes and videos and constant reposts and have fresh content on the homepage every day, which is all a lot of casual users care about.
Growth will slow, many of the communities that were really special will fade away or relocate. But they’ll still have memes and reposts so they’ll still have users.
They’ll push that slowly contracting userbase harder and harder to make money. Once they pull the plug on third party apps that paves the way for other changes. NSFW and old.reddit have to be next.
I think they’ll start blocking search engines too, like most social networks do. That will be an absolute travesty as for the last year or so Reddit search results (on google/etc, obviously not Reddit’s actual search, which is horrible) has been a small bastion of useful information amongst a sea of worthless AI generated Amazon affil spam listicle bullshit. (I’m going to be sooo pissed if they do that)
“We are not in the business of giving that [Reddit’s content] away for free.”
but…you are spez. That’s what social media is. A useful medium with a value determined by the size of its network. Restricting access makes your network less valuable.
Honestly treating hosting like for-profit media company is the biggest delusion of the 2010s-20s. It really only works in a system like email (see:fediverse) or maybe a wikipedia and Internet Archive nonprofit model.
So they’re going to pay mods and users then? Didn’t think so.
A reasonable and modest platform cost is what’s in order not a SV unicorn IPO.
What article?
Click on the title. It links to ZDNet’s article.
