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.
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.