Yesterday I read the excellent article by Cory Doctorow: Let the Platforms Burn and this particular anecdote The thing is, network effects are a double-edged sword. People join a service to be with the people they care about. But when the people they care about start to leave, everyone rushes for th...
The link contains db0's views on the ongoing state of Reddit, and I think that it's worth sharing here - both to document a piece of opinion, and as food for thought. The main points are:
a comparison between the current state of Reddit vs. Myspace near collapse;
the illusion that everything is fine based on "raw" numbers like engagement;
that Reddit was never a "good" site, but it had two positive points (open API and hands-off approach to communities), destroyed by the current events;
the ongoing progression of the Fediverse as alternative to Reddit;
the change in quality in both the content and the behaviour of the people still there.
EDIT: I hope that the author doesn't mind, but I'll copy the contents of the article inside the spoilers below. Hopefully for mobile users it'll be a bit more accessible.
People are leaving Reddit in droves but they’re a tiny minority. It’s far from collapse
Did you read the article? That is exactly what the author addressed and why he thinks it is heading towards collapse based on his experiences with Friendster and MySpace. Now Reddit is much larger than either of those sites, so it may be more resilient to users leaving (Twitter being a good parallel here, and potentially in the same boat), but they are very much following in the same footsteps as those other websites.
It's like a house of cards - depending on which card is missing, the whole thing falls down. Although it depends on what "to fall down" or "to collapse" means in this case.
For "collapse" = "noticeable and irreversible change of the number of active users, and their overall engagement": I think that the collapse will be slow-motion, because the content already in the site still retains a bit of the userbase. It won't be as fast as Myspace's. However the situation is looking similar to Myspace before the collapse.
Wasnt the point of the article that the tech literate people left? For sure the hardest crowd to please, but Id say they've settled here in Lemmy with the massive ammounts of tools and apps being created - with such a small userbase
The point is the quality, not the quantity. I see a common refrain on the threadiverse that the discussions are more in depth, insightful, thoughtful, etc. Slowly the rank and file of Reddit will get tired of how much less interesting and creative the content there is
