By banning porn. Out of all the things that could motivate people to search for alternatives, this might be the most durable driving factor.

Outside of that I think it will be a slow decline in quality. Eventually quality content will decrease more and more, and low effort memes and bot content will take over.

Delete old.reddit

All the longer term users who keep the ecosystem functional will leave in frustration. That is, the ones who didn’t leave already over spez deciding to kneecap third party clients.

Once those users are gone, the death spiral starts.

Not with a bang, but a whimper.

After the IPO, Reddit stock plummets and Steve Huffman leaves with a big payout. Reddit Inc appoints a new CEO who starts to push deeply unpopular changes in the name of turning a profit. There is a major exodus to other platforms.

Reddit goes the way of Digg v4.

My money is on slow decline in content quality. It might not ever die per se, it might just become Craigslist or Digg.

fade away quietly like Digg

If they survive IPO and the shits storm that will bring, It will be the porn ban. We all know someone with a big wallet is going to push the change eventually.

I think the new preferential treatment in Googles algo will cancel out people leaving due to content getting stale.

IPO -> billionaire purchase -> enshittification -> never dies but sucks forever

The same way it happened with digg: Clear turn against user interests to chase revenue from brands directly, a slow but steady drain of its important users to competitors, a sinking of its stock value, until it is finally acquired by a online brands clearinghouse like Demand Media for parts.

Itll slowly bleed out users to a number of alternative forms of social media and become functionally irrelevant like Slashdot. Still alive but in the same way someone with most of their brain turned to fluid and kept alive on life support.

Users migrate to Lemmy..... /s

I know you said it but it’s not going to die completely. Hell, MySpace is still around.

You mean it isn't dead yet? Huh.

It gets bought by a different company (possible through majority share acquisition), the new company makes a lot of changes (removing NSFW communities, etc) triggering stronger protests than the API changes because it affects more users.

Something new and better and big and reddit-like probably pops up while reddit continue with their enshittyfication, slowly but surely it will die like Digg.

*note: that new thing isn't lemmy but something else by another big corpo, just like Bluesky.

It'll die the same reason quora dies. really bad content inaccessible through enshitification

Well, they reached out to me (and many others on-platform) to buy shares in their IPO. Something-something contributor something.

Anyway, no VC worth half their salt will leave money on the table letting essentially the public buy equity at the same price as them.

So that's not a healthy sign for them.

it'll continue to stay up for years, funded by gullible investors who are convinced that the heavily sanitized and automated interactions are genuinely organic

Same as ever, Enshitification.

The ultime shitty decision they could took, like totally changing the visuals of the website(no more orange, no more gray mascot, etc...)

next inline with Slashdot and digg

By puffing up the company for the IPO then the class action fraud suit will bankrupt what is left after paying out the CEO.

When the CEO gets in a tiff with Google or Microsoft and starts blocking scraping for indexers. At some point someone in charge is going to get pissed off that search engines include significant text extracts of answers baked into their results (which is valid, we really need to crack down on how abusive Google is to the internet at large) and launch a lawsuit or two to block Google from including Reddit results in responses.

Once that happens all the valuable long term information on Reddit will be lost (there's absolutely no chance Reddit can build a decent search engine given how deeply unprofitable it is) and the site will be truly dead.

One evening Reddit, while at a play with his wealthy parents, decided to leave early and went out the side exit into the alley. Unfortunately for Reddit, in this story the ne'er-do-wells shoot the kid, parents were fine and they had more kids after, changing nothing but their name.

It's already dead to me.

Reddit died, it's a zombie propped up by tech bros like the rest of social media. The end.

Social media deaths are so slow and monotonous. I'm expecting something similar to Twitter and even Tumblr, where eventually it ends up in the hands of the only manchild CEO willing to touch it, and they start chasing users away personally.

Who is reddit?

Pretty similar to what's going on with Twitter right now.

One thing I just saw is new tools for brands. This doesn't say so, but I could imagine them allowing brands to pay to post on subreddits against the will of the moderators.

If they do that, or turn off old.reddit, I think they'll drive away many of the core users who make communities there valuable (those who didn't leave after the API debacle).

Same way reddit died for me; the front page was literally nothing but neo-nazi rage bait.

They do an IPO and a muskrat becomes the majority shareholder

By being bought by another company which then proceeds to discontinue it.