With Reddit, and perhaps also Twitter. Personally I deleted my accounts on both platforms and came here today, because I feel it was the moral thing to do. And I hope both platforms will burn down, and the new way forward is more community-driven social media instead of capitalist-driven. But realistically I think both will just slowly get worse in terms of quality (well, twitter doesn’t have much quality content for a while now anyway) and muddle through for a while. In the end it could go either way I think? What are your thoughts on where those platforms will end up, realistically?
Not sure about Twitter, but I predict a death spiral for Reddit.
At the start, most people won’t migrate from Reddit; that’s to be expected. Plenty have a “who cares, I’m here to see catpix” mindset, while others are holding into something like the gambler’s fallacy (“the community invested its time here, we shouldn’t be trashing it”). And they’ll generate some profit from ad views and shit like that, as if things were normal.
However content quality will degrade. That disengaged community is a blessing and a curse for Reddit - they might not care about Reddit’s actions, but they don’t care about contributing with it either. And the ones invested into their communities will eventually nurture communities elsewhere. Those 48% of organic search will become 45%, then 40%, then 35%… as people notice that Reddit is not useful for newer problems, only for older stuff.
The catpix become repetitive (“didn’t I see that same cat with a different name?”) and intertwined with more and more rubbish - because now the “he does it for free” meme isn’t just a way to taunt mods; as the facade of a “users, mods, admins all united for a greater Reddit” is gone; they’ll simply say “I’m not being paid for this, who cares.” Bots become a big issue - they don’t need the API to work.
Speaking on the API, Google and Microsoft “might consider” to buy API access to train their LLMs with, but decide that scrapping off the place “the old way” is cheaper anyway.
Businesses will notice that something is rotten in the kingdom of Reddit, and avoid investing on it. A few of them will fly around Reddit like vultures; never with a direct competitor (“here’s a forum platform and link aggregator”), but by extending their already established products just a tiny enough to overlap with Reddit functionality. Direct competitors need to handle the network effect issue, but those businesses don’t.
Advertisement space in Reddit becomes really cheap, as people and businesses don’t really care about the place enough to advertise there. And as a reaction, Reddit has more ad spaces, allows more intrusive ads, and becomes rather aggressive on its ad blocking instance. Users mentioning uBlock Origin or similar are shadowbanned.
The zero tech users are progressively using Reddit less and less. They might not care about a lot of things, but the place is useless for them.
You’ll see a thousand CEOs in a row in Reddit, trying to “put it back on the rails”. Spez probably left early (I hope penniless, but I don’t predict it; I think that most of those events will happen after the IPO, so the current shareholders will still get a fair bit of money, just not as much as they hoped).
Eventually internet users will correct you for writing “reddit”, because some assumer thought that you meant “read it”. Just like “digg” is now just a misspell for “dig”.
But what about the users? If they stopped using Reddit, they started using something else, right? A few of them will end here in Lemmy. There are tech issues here, but the platform is already “good enough” for a chunk of them. Others will simply disperse, because even going outside competes with Reddit.
It’s possible that in the future Lemmy stays small. Or that will grow as big as Reddit used to be. Either way, what happens with Lemmy won’t matter that much for the fate of Reddit.