By banning porn. Out of all the things that could motivate people to search for alternatives, this might be the most durable driving factor.
Outside of that I think it will be a slow decline in quality. Eventually quality content will decrease more and more, and low effort memes and bot content will take over.
Honestly the porn has gone way downhill. Or so I am told by friends of some casual acquaintences.
It’s all bots now. Some subs don’t even moderate their content to be relevant to the name of the sub anymore.
Delete old.reddit
All the longer term users who keep the ecosystem functional will leave in frustration. That is, the ones who didn’t leave already over spez deciding to kneecap third party clients.
Once those users are gone, the death spiral starts.
Yep. The day they kill old.reddit is the day I stop using it.
Tbf Reddit revenue comes from ads that are based on traffic, so even if 99% of the accounts are fake bots they still make money. I think that loophole will keep them on forever
I mean, not long term though? Advertisers and Marketers don’t invest if their ads don’t have some ROI. And no bot is going to engage with an ad to the point of actually result in a sale for obvious reasons.
I expect Reddit to die in a couple decades for the simple reason that no social media platform will out last a generation of users. I could be wrong, as the modern social media landscape isn’t even one generation old, and perhaps there will be multi generational social media platforms, but I just don’t see it.
My money is on slow decline in content quality. It might not ever die per se, it might just become Craigslist or Digg.
That’s my guess. They started going down hill when Advice Animals banned the Unpopular Opinion Puffin.
Today I learned Digg still exists.
I don’t know the last time I was linked to it, but yes it still does. The fate of some of these things is to eventually transition to a living museum, if they don’t die out for long enough. Like the Space Jam website.
After the IPO, Reddit stock plummets and Steve Huffman leaves with a big payout. Reddit Inc appoints a new CEO who starts to push deeply unpopular changes in the name of turning a profit. There is a major exodus to other platforms.
Reddit goes the way of Digg v4.
Not with a bang, but a whimper.
I know you’re quoting TS Eliot, but this for real. Just like MySpace, Digg, Cracked, and many similar sites, they will still exist for the longest time, but gradually evolve into an entirely unrecognizeable form. Then one day they’ll all shut down, and people will react with “the what-it now” and “that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.”
IPO -> billionaire purchase -> enshittification -> never dies but sucks forever
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.
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.
fade away quietly like 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.
The same way it happened with digg: Clear turn against user interests to chase revenue from brands directly, a slow but steady drain of its important users to competitors, a sinking of its stock value, until it is finally acquired by a online brands clearinghouse like Demand Media for parts.
Well, they reached out to me (and many others on-platform) to buy shares in their IPO. Something-something contributor something.
Anyway, no VC worth half their salt will leave money on the table letting essentially the public buy equity at the same price as them.
So that’s not a healthy sign for them.
Same as ever, Enshitification.
Something new and better and big and reddit-like probably pops up while reddit continue with their enshittyfication, slowly but surely it will die like Digg.
*note: that new thing isn’t lemmy but something else by another big corpo, just like Bluesky.
Users migrate to Lemmy… /s
