I think Reddit won’t exist in 3 years.
The latest update to the app + the crackdown on 3rd party apps convinced me of this.
It’s… terrible now, it was bad before but now it’s just worse in every way. Every other video is an ad, you now need to give an email to make an account, every other thing that pops up while scrolling is a goddamn corporate survey asking about what streaming services I use over and over and over again and making in many cases making a post just won’t work. WTF is happening to reddit!?
Every subsequent update will be more and more like this, less user friendly, less freedom of use, less reliability, soon you won’t even be able to stay anonymous. It really makes me feel that Reddit has crossed the threshold of taking on the mindset of “we have a total monopoly on this kind of service, now we milk it for all its worth because we’re the only mass-forum style platform like this and everyone who wants something like this has to come to us anyway”
They no longer give a shit about credibility, they long since stopped giving a shit about it’s users, the app (which the vast majority of users use) is objectively terrible. Mass banning and power-tripping by mods and admins is absolutely out of control, creating an oppressive, hostile environment for users, as is blatant social engineering/manipulation in juvenile power-plays by the company heads, creating subs with millions of users (most of whom are bots) fostering cult mentalities.
This isn’t the mindset of a company at the height of their power, this is the mindset of a company that’s about to go off a cliff. As soon as something else pops up with a freer, more open and more user-oriented philosophy and equal accessibility (there are alternatives with the former like Lemmy just none with the latter, yet) Reddit is doomed.
We all know how they’ll police it, they’ll have bots auto-ban anyone who mentions these alternatives or not allow any posts or comments that mention them to be posted, have bots dogpile hate on anyone who mentions them to turn off people from checking them out, but these are stop-gap measures.
3 years is just me spitballing, but I’d be surprised if Reddit is still a big thing in 5 years, and we know how big companies like Reddit handle periods of decline. They collapse completely due ti mismanagement and loss of trust and confidence by the customer/user base.
Eh, I think it’ll still be around just like Digg is. The quality will definitely never be the same though. I have a feeling it will turn into what Facebook is right now.
A lot of these dinosaurs still exist. Literally myspace.com is still up. They just are shells of what they were.
At least Fark has a squirrel. A geriatric squirrel, but a squirrel nonetheless.
Holy shit, I could’ve sworn MySpace got shut down years ago. Looks like it’s more of a celebrity and music news site nowadays than a social media site, so it may as well have.
Yup, even despite spaz’s best efforts to ruin it.
Tbh Facebook is still pretty big, like one of the biggest sites around. Though a lotta people just pop on there to look up local businesses that list their Facebook page as their website.
Reddit is undermining everything that made it successful in the first place. Facebook didn’t do that, they just lost growth because once everyone’s grandma joined nobody under 40 stayed active.
Exactly. Reddit was known as the front page of the internet and a lot of people who use it casually may not know the details (or care) about what’s going down. They’ll still visit the site for certain things, but just like fb, it’ll be filled with a lot of trash.
Even now, there are lots of people still using the site, which is why there are Lemmy bots grabbing and reposting to certain communities. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see it crash and burn, but could you see celebrities doing AMAs on Lemmy when they could barely understand Reddit?
Very true, but, is that a bad thing that Lemmy won’t be as big as Reddit?
I was a young man when the internet was still the wild west and all sorts of shit went around. But now it’s so conglomerated and dominated and so fucking “safe”, the more a major website balkanises and splits into many different parts, the better imo. Even if that means Lemmy stays niche, is that really a bad thing?
I think that more users = more quality posts but less overall quality
True, bug what if there were a way to split big instances in smaller ;-)
And maybe new instances filtering out the crap (and reposting the good stuff)…
I really enjoy that aspect about Lemmy. Interactions more organic and genuine and I hope it continues to be that way. I was merely making an example of why Reddit won’t completely die off.
If we were having this conversation there, this comment chain would likely be filled with meme responses. “Get a room, you two”, “Now kith”, etc.
Thanks for the friendly banter. :)
I suspect that, once it crosses a minimum threshold, PR companies will push their clients toward fediverse platforms for AMAs: they can host the discussions on their own instances with their own moderators while still reaching the whole federated user base.
As long as it shows up in Google searches it can be monetized. It’s not going anywhere. It’ll likely just be an empire in decline.
I don’t think Reddit is going anywhere. It has too much market share. Everyone keeps predicting the death of Twitter and yet it’s still going despite letting go a large part of its workforce. I don’t see Reddit being as incompetently run in comparison
yeah they wont die, they are just on a slow slide to irrelevance. each of these services is headed to be left after someones pivot or sell off, similar to FB. people will use it but ne signups will trend downward.
True, but a lack of engagement and lack of new signups is a ticking time bomb, as new accounts will be made but the majority of those will be bots or mass upvoting/downvoting programs with no real engagement.
That’s a ticking time bomb because, much like when Musk bought Twitter and found out the true amount of bots being counted as users, the shareholders will realise how grossly overvalued the company is and will flee en-masse.
i too have hopes for financial implosion on the long.
The problem with twitter specifically is that as opposed to other platforms it depends more on celebrities/artist etc than the big mass of people. As long as those people stick around, everyone who wants to get their info HAS to stick around.
Like i personally still use twitter sometimes. Not because i want to, but some artist i follow ONLY post on there.
Twitter is like a ship someone set on fire, but also like windows millennium (I mean windows is still here), let’s see what happens in the future 🤷
Supreme copium. Reddit isn’t going anywhere, as most of the users are still there. The overwhelming majority does not give a single shit about how shitty spez is :^).
Which part of the 90/9/1 are most of those users? Very few subs are truly back to business as usual, and it seems likely the rest will be forever weakened. Recovery would mean either existing users capitulate, or new users *filling the same role *taking their place.
Reddit won’t disappear by any means, but it’s also unlikely to remain such a go-to resource. Once a social media platform loses critical mass, it’s easy to enter a death spiral.
nah reddit will still be huge in 3 years, I’m pretty sure. But with a little bit of luck, the fediverse will be booming and much more like reddit used to be, rather than what reddit will be by then
I feel like it’s going to gain a lot of popularity among people who haven’t really used it in the past and have yet to discover it. While for us long-term users we are going to move on.
The general public does not understand what an API is, and does not really understand the changes Reddit is going through. As long as they download Reddit’s app, they will get sucked in without.
Reddit is far too recognizable of a name to die. Myspace still exists today, as does Digg. It may have peaked and shifted from its original vibe, and will continue to shift, but with it it’ll still live on as the investors try to figure out ways to claw back their money.
I’m sure in ten years time you’ll be able to visit reddit.com and be fed some cleansed ad friendly news feeds snuggled between ads, pointing you to content funded by marketing money. Just go to Digg right now and you’ll see it.
Reddit.com will exist, but be irrelevant. Look at Napster. They are still around! But who knows what they do now?
I thought Futurama made up Napster.
This is the most Zoomer comment ever.
Hey keep it quiet, Lars will hear you.
Reddit has 450m active users they lost a few hundred thousand.
There’s still plenty of content, plenty of mods and plenty of money. They will forget about this in a month.
People don’t matter. Content matters.
If big content creators leave, you’re going to have 450MM users sitting there looking at a blank screen.
I mean damn, my front page (not signed in) is so empty. I’m seeing the most random weird subreddits that I’ve never seen before, because there’s no other content making it to the front page.
Companies like Mojang (Minecraft devs) pulled out of Reddit today, so now they’ll have to wait for someone to repost all of the news, and have to go to different websites to report issues with the game. I’m sure other companies will eventually do the same.
Not to mention NSFW content is probably going to be really restricted or frowned upon, considering NSFW subs cannot be monitized. That pulls a TON of porn off the platform, which unsurprisingly amounts to a ton of users.
Is Reddit dead? No. But it’s going to drop dramatically in quality. We haven’t even hit July yet. Lots of people are going to be in for a rude awakening when their apps stop working. I know there’s a large amount of people who are very ignorant to all of this, and don’t even know their apps (and porn) are going to be gone July 1st.
I tried posting this on reddit too, specifically on the r/randomthoughts sub but, surprise surprise “oops we encountered a problem” typical.
Yes I am salty, how did you guess?
Reddit doesn’t need to die, it just needs to become irrelevant.
I think it will still be around, but as a shell of its former self (or, a shell of a shell of a shell of its former self) to the point where it’s completely unrecognizable and no one wants to use it anymore. You know, like how Digg and Myspace are still around, but they might as well be completely different websites.
Reddit will slowly become what Digg is now. It still exists, but everyone thinks of it as a shell of its former self.
It’s dying any time soon. They’re aiming for a fully enshittified, infinite vertical scrolling type deal and those can live off inertia and network effect alone. The frontpage has been recycled lowest common denominator content for a while anyway.
If it’s not around, it won’t be because of the current controversy. It will be because there are better alternatives. Lemmy is one of the contenders.
Also the fact t that there are several lawsuits for violating GDPR/CPPA. That seems like a death-knell for being so early in the IPO game.
I think the Official subreddits are what will keep Reddit propped up.
It will. Digg is still around and reddit killed it over 10 years ago.
Similarly, reddit will die, but it will still be around.
We need Tom from MySpace to create a Lemmy instance.
I’d be on that in a second!
