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As Reddit Crushes Protests, Its User Traffic Returns to Normal (www.pcmag.com)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.ml
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[–] 23 points 3 years ago (2 children)

I'm very curious how this is going to play out. This mostly concerns the core userbase, as in mods and the people who are the most active on Reddit. If a significant portion of those wanders off (or is straight up banned), I could see the platform desolate slowly and painfully.

I mean, they lose content and moderation. I would be very surprised if they can replace the volunteers and still maintain the quality of the moderation.

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  • [–] 20 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    My guess is that Reddit loses about 5% of traffic by shutting off API access. It isn't great, but it isn't bad either. Spez treats it as a win.

    Mod burnout becomes a big thing in a year, with many major subs starting to lock threads and blanket ban harder as the more experienced mods leave and the new set isn't really prepared to handle the workload. A lot of the best of this new block are going to be alt-right, and you'll slowly see subs become more friendly to alt-right views. Mod abuse gets a lot worse.

    As the entire site becomes r/conservative, expect the fights that happened with r/The_Donald to be worse and make the site more unusable. This will probably drive off more users as "everything is political". Reddit won't keep its promises on building better mod toolkits, and a lot of LBGT groups leave for other sites.

    As the website starts to see a shrinking user base and still hasn't made money, either Spez or a successor goes full Twitter Musk and cuts staff to the bone in hopes of trying to keep some revenue.

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  • [–] 15 points 3 years ago

    Good observation about how enshittification tends to come with a drift to the far right. At the moment one of the refreshing things about Lemmy is that you can have a discussion in peace without all those people piling in. I hope this can last.

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  • [–] 18 points 3 years ago* (3 children)

    Enshitification doesn't happen over night. It might be months before the needle moves. Platforms die because users seek alternatives, but everyone has a different threshold for when they decide to jump ship. Most people just are not paying attention and will only leave when they experience the shit of Enshitification first hand.

    And that hasn't happened on Reddit. Yet...

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I also think reddit is still the overwhelmingly greatest source of human-written information and discussion on the planet. That will take a while to replace.

    I have tried googling for things without adding on "reddit" these past two weeks, and it's... not good.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    Try a different search engine, like kagi. It's paid but it's worth it.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    Idk their example search for "python exceptions" has the #14 link for Ruby exceptions, #15 for C++ exceptions, #17 for Make exceptions (no mention of the word python in this one).

    It seems like many of the links at this point have zero mentions of the word "python" at all. Why are people paying for this?

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    Twitter had to kill 3rd party apps twice in order for the mastodon migration to happen. First they did it in 2011 and then again after Elon bought the company.

    I imagine a true Twitter > Mastodon level migration away from Reddit won't happen yet. But once they inevitably dump old.reddit.com, it might.

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