Future incidents probably will still happen, but when you develop in the open it’s much easier for people to trust you when you talk about incident response and mitigation, because they can see what’s happening out in the open. In contrast, nobody trusts Reddit to do what they say.

Reddit doesnt produce any content itself, so viewing and commenting in general isn’t particularly important. What matters more are valuable contributions.

What even constitutes value in this case, though? And if viewing isn’t important, then why have “valuable contributions” at all? The purpose of reddit is to sell advertising space. They leverage the website’s audience for this purpose. Reddit’s users are the product being sold. The content is how they draw in users.

There is already an army of repost bots which aren’t going away. The bots don’t care about the health of the platform, so we can assume they are at maximum repost saturation.

We really can’t assume that, though. Also, “maximum repost saturation” would, by definition, be literally all content submitted via repost bots. They’re not there yet. Not by a long shot. But the share of posts submitted via automated means is definitely climbing.

And reposts still require new content generation to make reposts. You can’t repost the same stale content perpetually.

A huge portion of reddit’s content links externally. It’s literally a link aggregator. It’s not difficult to have a system that aggregates links and website headings, dumps that into a database, and then a bot parses out new entries and builds submissions from those based on some arbitrary set of metrics. The content is still generated, but it’s generated externally and then consumed by the system.

But it’s popularity and userbase can dwindle over time. Tumblr still exists, but it’s a shell of its former self.

The Tumblr situation is complicated. Yahoo, the company that owned Tumblr at the time, outright banned all pornography on Tumblr because the site had a pretty bad CP problem, which they couldn’t think of a better way to handle. This was at a time where porn was integral to Tumblr’s ecosystem, far more so than it is, or arguably has been, for reddit’s. Reddit has also done the much more intelligent and careful thing of slowly squeezing out adult content from the website in order to appeal to advertisers. It’s been happening for literally years, coinciding with a not incidental decrease in average user age. Reddit ownership seems a lot more aware of the website’s value proposition and is careful not to make overwhelmingly drastic changes to how it operates. Yes, quality is decreasing, but it’s like boiling a frog. Quality has always been decreasing, and if that’s the case, it’s hard to notice because it’s always been happening.

It’s not the past actions that will slowly strangle reddit, but the future ones. It will certainly be there, these things tend to stick around far, far longer after they’ve turned into shambling zombies of formerly-good content. But it’ll become a revolving door running on reputation more than any kind of quality product.

Man, we don’t live in the age of quality products anymore, if we ever actually did. Cable television was one of the most successful industries for decades. Almost everything produced for it is cultural ephemera, meant to be consumed in the moment but discarded from memory immediately after. Look at how many fucking seasons of Survivor there are. Perhaps it’s in human nature to crave things that entertain in the moment but leave no lasting impression. I can’t say. But I can say that reddit’s been like that for a long time now. Maybe at one point it wasn’t, but they seem to believe that it’s more successful the shallower the level of engagement. And they’re probably right. Reddit will continue to make itself more palatable to corporate advertisers as the internet is slowly reinvented as “Television 2.0” and it continues its trend of being purely a glorified water cooler to post whatever inane reaction you have to whatever the current social media controversy or celebrity scandal occurred that week. What worries me is that people think companies can’t behave like this and profit, when history indicates the opposite, or that websites like Lemmy are immune from the possibility of just becoming equally banal, worthless places, just ran on donations instead of advertising dollars.

Ah, trying to stop the Exodus by any means necessary. Lol. Time to find a good thread to get my old account banned on then!

F /u/spez is only following Twitter who’ve already banned user profiles & comments from containing links to Mastadon, Post, Instagram & others.

Yeah, it should be obvious that you won’t have much success using Reddit as a platform to direct users away from Reddit. They’ve made it pretty clear by now that they aren’t free or open. Makes me wonder what other topics they’ve done this more subtlety for, or will do in the future.

If you want to direct people to Reddit alternatives, you’ll probably have the most luck on platforms that aren’t Reddit.

Though I do wonder if Twitter and the meta platforms will also block it, since they are competing with the fediverse as well (though meta in a EEE kinda sense, so they’d need to walk a finer line since they are supposed to be embracing right now).

YouTube might be a place to do it.

The content continues to change. When I have a specific programming question they don’t help me figure things out based on the documentation alone. Seeing discussion about such topics definitely helps it as knowledge continues to evolve.

Oh absolutely. I just use it as an example because it’s one of only a few heavily restricted subs that hasn’t yet been purged by admins.

I miss some of the more niche communities.

Hopefully over time they will migrate here. I’d have a go at making them myself but I’m totally inexperienced with making and modding a community.

You can use it on mobile by using Firefox Nightly, enabling the add-ons collection workaround, and installing the old.reddit redirect addon (and uBlock).

Granted, browsing old.reddit on a mobile screen is not a great experience but it’s leagues better than the alternative.