I expect this is going to be the end of Reddit. It doesnât take much to push a community like those who create and manage so much of Redditâs content to jump ship and take their talent and eyeballs elsewhere. And if I remember correctly, Redditâs code is open-source, which means it would be easy enough for some motivated mods to set up their own identical site pretty quickly. And there are dozens of other platforms that do much of what Reddit does anyway - itâs just a matter of having a reason to find an alternative and bringing together a critical mass.
As a casual user of Reddit that checks a few times a day, Iâm not so sure. My day to day experience has been relatively unchanged through all of this, but I definitely remember the crap Digg went through before I switched and it doesnât feel at all the same. Digg was overloaded with self-promoting spammers and people that could game the system to keep their content on the front page, Reddit makes it trivial to avoid this by breaking it up into subreddits. Maybe places like /r/IAMA wonât be as huge or well done as before, but that has no affect on subreddits for specific games and TV shows that I follow. Them showing that they are willing to ban subreddits full of harassers makes me more likely to stay on Reddit.
People who feel that recent changes have ruined Reddit are perfectly welcome to start a new Reddit or try Voat, but they shouldnât kid themselves into thinking they are the Majority in any way. As long as /r/funny continues to have stupid pictures Reddit will continue to see most of the same users.
They may not be the majority but then, the majority are not the central content creators. If the central generating mechanism goes full exodus then the majority will eventually follow.
I suspect that there is enough inertia to at least sustain them until the new management does whatever the unspecified ânew directionâ that keeps being ominously hinted at is.
Nobody seems to be saying; but if the very popular AMA coordinator/community relations person got fired because she didnât fit in with the ânew directionâ; the old CEO quit because she didnât share the boardâs vision for the ânew directionâ; and nobody has laid out the ânew directionâ as an exciting âSorry we screwed up; but just look at the cool plan!â; Iâm going to guess that it wonât go over very well.
I have to wonder if there is some ego tripping going on here, or if somebody on the owner/investor side decided that letting Reddit be Reddit indefinitely wasnât going to deliver that shareholder value; and started pushing for monetization. Youâd think that the original crew wouldnât be dumb enough to muck it up(but that has been false quite a few times throughout history, so maybe they are); but it is also possible that Advance Publications, Inc. was getting edgy about all the unpleasant PR that Redditâs less savory users were accruing; and demanding that something be done.
Iâm not sure who is supposed to be the central generating mechanism here. Content creators arenât putting their stuff on Reddit, redditors are. Most subreddits donât allow people to put their own stuff up, someone has to submit it for them. So as long as someone finds something interesting, they can submit it to Reddit for other people to see. 99.9% of Reddit will be unaffected by any of the new content policies, because even if they start removing âdistastefulâ content at large, that still doesnât affect most major subreddits. And unless Iâm mistaken theyâll still rely on moderators to enforce that policy.
Spam has been a problem for a long time.
I moderate a 50k-subscriber techology-specific reddit and it can be difficult without RES to figure out whatâs spam and whatâs legit content.
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