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By banning porn. Out of all the things that could motivate people to search for alternatives, this might be the most durable driving factor.
Outside of that I think it will be a slow decline in quality. Eventually quality content will decrease more and more, and low effort memes and bot content will take over.
Honestly the porn has gone way downhill. Or so I am told by friends of some casual acquaintences.
It's all bots now. Some subs don't even moderate their content to be relevant to the name of the sub anymore.
A friend told me that it depends on whether you like the free content that OnlyFans content provider will give out.
Soooo what we are basically seeing in real time ATM?
Delete old.reddit
All the longer term users who keep the ecosystem functional will leave in frustration. That is, the ones who didnβt leave already over spez deciding to kneecap third party clients.
Once those users are gone, the death spiral starts.
Yep. The day they kill old.reddit is the day I stop using it.
Tbf Reddit revenue comes from ads that are based on traffic, so even if 99% of the accounts are fake bots they still make money. I think that loophole will keep them on forever
I mean, not long term though? Advertisers and Marketers don't invest if their ads don't have some ROI. And no bot is going to engage with an ad to the point of actually result in a sale for obvious reasons.
I expect Reddit to die in a couple decades for the simple reason that no social media platform will out last a generation of users. I could be wrong, as the modern social media landscape isn't even one generation old, and perhaps there will be multi generational social media platforms, but I just don't see it.
Not with a bang, but a whimper.
I know you're quoting TS Eliot, but this for real. Just like MySpace, Digg, Cracked, and many similar sites, they will still exist for the longest time, but gradually evolve into an entirely unrecognizeable form. Then one day they'll all shut down, and people will react with "the what-it now" and "that's a name I've not heard in a long time."
After the IPO, Reddit stock plummets and Steve Huffman leaves with a big payout. Reddit Inc appoints a new CEO who starts to push deeply unpopular changes in the name of turning a profit. There is a major exodus to other platforms.
Reddit goes the way of Digg v4.
My money is on slow decline in content quality. It might not ever die per se, it might just become Craigslist or Digg.
This has already happened. Just the niche communities haven't migrated away yet.
That's my guess. They started going down hill when Advice Animals banned the Unpopular Opinion Puffin.
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.
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.
The same way it happened with digg: Clear turn against user interests to chase revenue from brands directly, a slow but steady drain of its important users to competitors, a sinking of its stock value, until it is finally acquired by a online brands clearinghouse like Demand Media for parts.
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.
I know you said it but itβs not going to die completely. Hell, MySpace is still around.
You mean it isn't dead yet? Huh.
It's the walking dead ... it's like someone with an infection that isn't being treated and eventually will develop gangrene, lose a limb, keep living for a while and still recieve no treatment.
Users migrate to Lemmy..... /s
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.
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.
It'll die the same reason quora dies. really bad content inaccessible through enshitification
Something new and better and big and reddit-like probably pops up while reddit continue with their enshittyfication, slowly but surely it will die like Digg.
*note: that new thing isn't lemmy but something else by another big corpo, just like Bluesky.
it'll continue to stay up for years, funded by gullible investors who are convinced that the heavily sanitized and automated interactions are genuinely organic
The ultime shitty decision they could took, like totally changing the visuals of the website(no more orange, no more gray mascot, etc...)
next inline with Slashdot and digg
By puffing up the company for the IPO then the class action fraud suit will bankrupt what is left after paying out the CEO.
One evening Reddit, while at a play with his wealthy parents, decided to leave early and went out the side exit into the alley. Unfortunately for Reddit, in this story the ne'er-do-wells shoot the kid, parents were fine and they had more kids after, changing nothing but their name.
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?
Shit content and answered posts making Reddit irrelevant for "googling" job people is how it will die, the same way Quora became shit. Copypasta and bot answers, long answers with no substance aimed at karma farming is how they all die.
Reddit is starting to fall apart already and while I benefitted a lot from it and contributed a lot, I am not sad about its death.
It's already dead to me.
Who is reddit?
Pretty similar to what's going on with Twitter right now.
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).
Reddit died, it's a zombie propped up by tech bros like the rest of social media. The end.
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.
They do an IPO and a muskrat becomes the majority shareholder
Same way reddit died for me; the front page was literally nothing but neo-nazi rage bait.
By being bought by another company which then proceeds to discontinue it.