this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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As someone who runs a small buisness and has paid for ads online. Why the hell would I want an ad on a platform where half of its users are planning to jump ship?
That’s overestimating the number of users who are planning to jump ship for sure. We are the noisy ones because we have a lot to complain about right now. It probably more like 1-5% that are planning to leave Reddit indefinitely.
The key word though is “planning”. Because that 1-5% contains an outsized portion of the biggest moderators, content creators, and active users. After we jump ship, Reddit is going to have more spam and abuse (and learn the value of the free moderation they’ve been getting up til now), and less valuable content once you get through that. So Reddit might end up losing half its users as it becomes more useless, even if it’s only a small fraction that’s planning to leave right now.
People forget that there is a huge bias in online engagement towards whoever is unhappy with a thing. You see it in gaming subs all the time. People who like the game tend to... play the game, while people who have a bone to pick are the ones who put it down and vent their frustrations online.
Even if 80% of the comments about a game are negative, that 80% might all come from 15% of the player base who dislike it.
I fear the same thing is happening with Reddit. It's a very engaged 5% that's making up 90% of the comments.
I do hope I'm either wrong, or without that 5%, content quantity and/or quality drops enough to impact casual users' screen time.