this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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Yes, reddit will always retain some user base and they might even continue to grow. But the quality will be worse. Just like Facebook and other social media platforms, there will be users that simply don't care enough to look for alternatives. I really hope that it will be a downward spiral for them. Too many (contributing) core users leaving, moderation getting worse and spammers and karma farmers reducing the quality of posts to a point where it's just too cumbersome to scroll through all the crap to find a worthy post. I think that reddit either reverses its decision or that it will slowly fade into meaninglessness....
The quality has been dropping for years and years. I miss reddit from a decade ago, when niche little community things could happen leaving waves across the site.
Now we just get a ton of the same things over and over, hardcore advertising and mass manipulation. It's no longer the tiny little site nobody knew about but is instead the big focus for all the businesses out there that think there's a market to be had. Plus there's the herd mentality that always comes from giant populations on a platform.
Don't get me wrong, there are still niche communities but they just don't have the same flavor of cohesion that they did in earlier times.
This is also my take. Reddit today is very different from DIGG 10 years ago, in that for a majority of users, their experience of USING the site will not change. These users access the site normally, or even with an ad blocker, but that's about it. For them, nothing has changed.
What's left is a vocal, but powerful minority. Reddit Enhancement Suite for desktop users won't notice a change at all, until Reddit decides to do otherwise. Same with old.reddit. 3rd Party app users are the only ones FORCED to use something different: Official app, Desktop, or leave/move to Lemmy/Kbin. Reddit will still keep going, but the overall quality and usefulness will decline. Spez is betting that this will be enough to survive, and he's probably right. Their valuation can tank all they want but it's still in the Billions from what I last saw.