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As Reddit Crushes Protests, Its User Traffic Returns to Normal
(www.pcmag.com)
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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I think that it's important to note the 1% rule.
Most of the traffic of any given platform will be created by people who interact with it only passively; they mostly lurk and, for good or bad, they don't care about it. Admins this, mods that, who the fuck cares, my cat pics sprout spontaneously from the internet.
In the meantime the people who actually contribute with the platform will be a tiny fraction of it. They don't add traffic, but they add value - because they're the ones responsible for creating the content (posting), aggregating value to the content (commenting), sorting the content (voting and moderating). The admins' decisions and the mod revolts affected specially bad this group. And... well, not even the stupid like to be called stupid, and that's basically what the admins did.
Now consider the link. The lurkers are back to Reddit because there's still content to be consumed there, but eventually it'll run dry - because the contributors are leaving the site. As such, you don't expect the mod revolts to have a short-term impact on the site, but rather a long-term one: the site will become less and less popular over time, as the lurkers are looking for content there and... well, nobody is providing them jack shit. Eventually the site will be forgotten by the masses, just like Digg was.
So Reddit will die, mind you. But it won't be a sudden death; it'll be a slow bleeding.
I just wish that this process was slightly faster, specially before the IPO.
The content will stay, at least in terms of posts. If the value-adders go to other sites, someone will just repost that value back to reddit.
It'll devolve into something like instagram, where it's literally impossible to discuss anything in the comments. Unfortunately that doesn't mean they stop making money.
Content loses relevance over time, and becomes increasingly harder to retrieve as noise piles up: pointless threads, re-re-re-reposts, "marketing opportunities" (i.e. spam), so goes on. Reddit Inc.'s actions pissed off specially bad the people who were removing that noise - moderators.
Usually you'd have the contributors doing this; the lurkers don't care about sharing. But even if someone/something (AI) consistently keeps posting stuff from other platforms back into Reddit, those newer posts will be further removed from the original source, and they'll arrive later. Reddit stops being the "front face of the internet" to become "yet another bottom feeder of the internet".
In Reddit's case, I think that it does. Reddit might've started as a link aggregator, but its main value was as a forum platform. Without the ability to discuss anything deeper than "two plus two equals GOOD! EDIT WOW THANKS FOR THE GOLD, KIND STRANGER!@!11ONE", it's just yet another link aggregator again.