This is literally just the r/nyt subreddit about The New York Times.
Given he apparently takes inspiration from Elon Musk, it’s only a matter of time until u/spez starts adding post view limits unless you pay extra.
This is literally just the r/nyt subreddit about The New York Times.
Given he apparently takes inspiration from Elon Musk, it’s only a matter of time until u/spez starts adding post view limits unless you pay extra.
Realistically, reddit will be fine. The percentage of users that solely used the 3rd party apps to view and comment was relatively small. Some power users might leave. Some mods might leave. But reddit doesn’t really care about those, since they can just spawn their own army of repost bots and farm clicks from people who have only ever used the website via the official app and who have grown accustomed to being inundated with unblockable advertisements. Twitter seems to be doing a lot worse, though. But I don’t have statistics to prove how well or poorly any particular website is doing.
Reddit doesnt produce any content itself, so viewing and commenting in general isn’t particularly important. What matters more are valuable contributions. I would posit that 3rd party app users provided disproportionately more valuable content than the official app users.
There is already an army of repost bots which aren’t going away. The bots don’t care about the health of the platform, so we can assume they are at maximum repost saturation.
And reposts still require new content generation to make reposts. You can’t repost the same stale content perpetually.
I don’t think reddit is going to just die. But it’s popularity and userbase can dwindle over time. Tumblr still exists, but it’s a shell of its former self.
It took me a minute to acclimate to Lemmy and I tried browsing via the official app while I did so. Let me tell you, it was awful. I got over reddit about 2 days after RIF was gone.
It’s not the past actions that will slowly strangle reddit, but the future ones. It will certainly be there, these things tend to stick around far, far longer after they’ve turned into shambling zombies of formerly-good content. But it’ll become a revolving door running on reputation more than any kind of quality product.
Obviously in our free world, people are free to enjoy the garbage and some will. But it creates an opportunity for others in the market, like us, to make a quality spot again, and pull users with that.
Man, we don’t live in the age of quality products anymore, if we ever actually did. Cable television was one of the most successful industries for decades. Almost everything produced for it is cultural ephemera, meant to be consumed in the moment but discarded from memory immediately after. Look at how many fucking seasons of Survivor there are. Perhaps it’s in human nature to crave things that entertain in the moment but leave no lasting impression. I can’t say. But I can say that reddit’s been like that for a long time now. Maybe at one point it wasn’t, but they seem to believe that it’s more successful the shallower the level of engagement. And they’re probably right. Reddit will continue to make itself more palatable to corporate advertisers as the internet is slowly reinvented as “Television 2.0” and it continues its trend of being purely a glorified water cooler to post whatever inane reaction you have to whatever the current social media controversy or celebrity scandal occurred that week. What worries me is that people think companies can’t behave like this and profit, when history indicates the opposite, or that websites like Lemmy are immune from the possibility of just becoming equally banal, worthless places, just ran on donations instead of advertising dollars.
History is no longer a very good tool when it comes to analyzing the tech space. It simply moves too quickly, everything that happens is unprecedented in its combination of specific mechanism and social circumstances.
But we’ll see I suppose.
It used to move quickly. We’re not in the wild west of social media anymore. That was the period from around 2006 to 20016. There’s a handful of huge corporations in the social media tech space that “won the war,” so to speak. What’s the most recent shakeup? Tumblr died because Yahoo decided porn was too dangerous to keep around. Call that one a nail in the coffin of the once mighty Silicon Valley giant and original search engine. But as for new social media sites, the most recent one is TikTok, and that one has been around for years at this point. Lemmy, Mastodon, Threads, etc. are just reinventions of existing architectures. There’s nothing new, really. Just people trying to recapture the appeal of already existing websites. The internet is slowing down, hardening into forms that will potentially last the rest of the century, like what happened with television and radio.