So I saw this on mastodon ... and it's a little weird, perhaps not unlike the cultures that migrants develop in their new homes.

There's a tendency, I think, to overestimate how bad the "old" platform has become since "we" left. In reality, it's not nearly that bad, if any different at all, and those of us not inclined toward this overestimation go and check the old platform from time to time and get confused as to where all of this "hellscape deadness" is.

I think we can all imagine to some extent why this might happen. But I'm writing this just in case it's healthy to point out that it need not happen, and that the thing that's actually changed, though you might not know if you've arrived here recently, is this place, which is a whole new thing!

A story I think of along these lines is what Steve Jobs did when he went back to Apple in the late 90s. Back then Apple thought they had to beat Microsoft to win. Thing is the company was close to dying with huge debts etc and were never going to do that (still haven't come close today). But they were so enamoured with their past to the point of having a museum of all of their old products. Jobs had the museum removed, told everyone that for Apple to win it has to stop thinking about Microsoft because they'll never be destroyed, instead Apple had to win by doing its own thing, and then, super contraversially for the time, had Bill Gates invest a bunch of money into Apple and appear on the big screen during a keynote to rather audible "boos".

It doesn't matter what Reddit's doing or whether they're doing well. It matters if we're doing well ... as cheesy as that might sound.

I'm wondering how much of that is bots.

Reddit is trying to build up to an IPO, so it's not far-fetched to think that Steve Huffman would have seen the exodus coming, and supplemented traffic with bots so the drop in engagement didn't seem so precipitous.

I think the thing that is going to suffer most is comment quality. Unfortunately (or for Huffman, fortunately), it's not really something that can be quantified.

I think we will see a slow decline until the platform is basically walking dead. It'll function, and maybe there will even be apparent engagement, but the quality will be nothing like it was before this whole debacle.

I went to some threads on Reddit yesterday. Bloody hell there a lot of shit to wade through before getting to anything useful. It might be more engagement, but the amount of low-effort garbage comments turned me around really quick.