The Reddit was my go to. The place for advice. I learned a lot there.
But now, it’s all John Oliver.
Usually I wouldn’t complain about John Oliver. But this shit is getting ANNOYING. I WANNA LEARN ABOUT PIRACY GODDAMNIT. If a good service is shut down, I wouldn’t be able to hear about it if it wasn’t for you guys. If a website had a virus problem. If I was having trouble. Thank whoever made this website and this community. You’re our only hope.
It’s incredibly childish to asume a bunch of John Oliver memes are going to make Reddit “lose”. They’ll “win” no matter what.
Once people start getting tired of the John Oliver meme, they’ll either just stop and leave Reddit, or continue to use it normally. Mark my words: in 2 months, go and click the profiles of everyone memeing around with the Oliver stuff, and most of them will have normal activity on Reddit as if nothing had happened. And subs that continue with the memes are just going to be abandoned while replacement subs will surface and get bigger than the originals.
The only way Reddit is going to feel a hit is if hundreds of thousands people edit their entire comment and post history, delete their accounts, and never visit the site again. But then again, Facebook had a much, MUCH worse situation and they’re still fine.
Is Facebook really fine though? All the interesting ppl I knew stopped using it a long time ago. People just use it to message a few specific ppl they know IRL and trade shit on FB marketplace, or spam pictures of their baby nobody wants to see, but everyone knows and acknowledges how garbage it has become.
Yeah, that’s super hip and all, but Facebook is still valued at 711.96 BILLION dollars, and growing. Just to put that into perspective, Reddit is valued at 2% of that…
As you can see, all the interesting ppl you know leaving the platform didn’t make anything to them as a company, and it’s exactly what is going to happen with Reddit as most people don’t even care about the API thing. The official app has 100+ million downloads vs Sync, for example, which has 1+ million downloads on the Play Store (and I’m sure that on the iOS side with Apollo it’s exactly the same if download data was public). Thousands of new adopters will keep arriving every single day, new communities will be created. Next thing you know, your grandma hangs around in knitting subreddits.
As I’ve said, corpos will win at the end of the day, unless they get the middle finger from everyone, not just the 1% of its community.
It depends which “interesting people” you’re talking about. I’d say investors like Peter Thiel (*spits on the ground) leaving the company were a key sign that it’s past its prime.
For reddit, it doesn’t need to be a middle finger from everyone. It needs to be some critical mass - and not even a critical mass of users, but of key content creators. However, all the bots and fake stories on reddit will likely help it limp on a while longer.
“Key content creators” like who, specifically?
I’ve seen this argument and I still don’t understand it. I might be wrong but do people actually believe the site was all shinny and interesting because of a group of superstar redditors who posted all the good stuff?
Reddit has 1.660 billion monthly active users. Sure, most of them just lurk around, but everyone is replaceable: mods, “content creators”, you name it. One goes away, and 100 more are in line waiting for their chance.
I’m not sure why so many people are treating this as a black or white thing. Either Reddit dies in a week or they “win”. It’s gonna take years and years for it to actually “die”, it’s just going to get shittier and shittier, while hopefully it gets better and better around here, and maybe if we want to put the optimistic hat we can even hope that the federated nature means it won’t suffer the same fate all these corporations go through.
I agree with your point about the content creators though, like yeah it’s a small % that actually created the content, but that small % is still millions of people, not just a few superstars (unless you’re talking about the gallowboobs and other mass posters but I wouldn’t say these accounts are the ones making the good content).
That’s exactly what I’m trying to say.
This all started because OP thanked God for this space to replace r/piracy, now that the subreddit is a meme cesspool, and a dude came to claim “people like him are going to make Reddit win”.
These people don’t realize we are the 0.01% of Reddit’s users, and two pathetic days of “blackout”, a week of memes and a couple of rogue mods isn’t this brave, heroic, mass-scale social movement that will suddenly kill Reddit overnight. Reddit will keep growing both in users and financially, and it’ll need years of hundreds of thousands of people ditching the site and replacing it with something else PERMANENTLY, for them to even feel a hit.
So regarding people’s comments about Reddit already being doomed and an inch away from disappearing because some of us left, the reality is that it’s exactly the opposite. They don’t need us to “win” which for them is to keep growing.