this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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Yep. I think people need to think about what "failure" means in this context. Reddit isn't going to go away, and honestly the "default" experience - what you see when you just visit the homepage - isn't likely to change much at all IMO.
The thing is I haven't liked the default reddit experience for many years. The draw of reddit was that they could do all their crappy changes to the default-level site and it still left the niche discussion-based communities to their own devices.
Now they've affected those communities, which is why I'm here. But I'm well aware that a great majority of reddit's userbase uses reddit to doomscroll through endless insipid bot-generated meme lists. None of that is going to change. People like me who care about the small places that will be impacted are in a very small minority compared to the overall userbase of reddit.
So reddit will fail (or has failed) for my use case, certainly. But I'm under no illusion that it will cease to exist.
I feel like I’m being repetitive, but yes your point that the Reddit popular/all front pages won’t be dramatically affected is spot on. Those are where a huge amount of passive users spend their time, and the posts there have been trash and reposts for years now.
The quality content enjoyed by many people who jumped ship was never showing up on the front page anyway. I made numerous original content posts that gained a lot of traction relative to the niche subreddit it was in, but my 3K upvoted quality content was never going to compete for popular/all space with a 50k upvoted repost of a repost of TikTok video.
I did notice, when I visited Reddit desktop today that r/popular has a lot of political posts, despite one of popular’s reasons for existing to be a non-political alternative to r/all. I wonder if that’s something that’s crept in over time and I never noticed, or if that’s the result of losing so many subreddits that politics had to backfill popular though.
I think being repetitive is ok, because I continue to see the sentiment out there that everyone who is upset about reddit is delusional and think reddit will be closed in a month, etc.
The reality is more complicated. And I think a lot of people don't get it because a real lot of people actually don't ever see the great parts of reddit that we all loved.
I like to get that message out there as much as possible because saying reddit is ruined for my usage isn't the same as saying it is going to go under.