Pretty similar to what’s going on with Twitter right now.
Users migrate to Lemmy… /s
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
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.
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.
This is honestly what I expect to happen. Once the porn is banned, people will stop going there. It has a lot of info for obscure communities and tech communities, but eventually that will start to move to other places.
So, I guess it will slowly die out.
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.
I never understood this. They were sitting on a mountain of data. It’s maybe a masters project or at maximum a PhD to build a search engine from it. That’s 60k a year, for 3 years, max. How did they have no interest in building their own search?
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.
Reddit died, it’s a zombie propped up by tech bros like the rest of social media. The end.
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).
fade away quietly like Digg
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.
I know you said it but it’s not going to die completely. Hell, MySpace is still around.
By being bought by another company which then proceeds to discontinue it.
So, Google is going to buy it?
