[_zzaw]

I think you're right, partly. But I also think that a lot of the people who put up with it are the passive ones who don't really contribute much to communities anyway; they're just there.

The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits from—are, as far as I can tell, more likely to get a lot angrier about abusive corporate nonsense, simply because they're more invested.

The more invested you are, the more screwed you feel. That's something that a person like Huffman is incapable of grasping, to his company's detriment.

I don't think the blackout alone will end Reddit. I don't think any one thing will end Reddit. I think, similar to Twitter, that it'll be a series of things: indignities large and small that successively alienate the people who matter most to these companies whether the C-level/marketer types realize it or not.

And at some point, similar to what I expect will happen to Twitter, Reddit will simply no longer be relevant in the way it once was. Whether they understand why is another question, but to me, it's always been clear.

tl;dr: Reddit the company is just a dumb pipe. Reddit as we think of it is a culture and community. That culture and community is defined by a relatively small collection of people who are on there because they care. When enough of them get disgusted enough to go elsewhere, Reddit—both the company and the community—will cease to exist in any meaningful capacity.

[pixl97]

Reddit once faked tons of users making posts. I have a feeling they'll look for ways to do it again.

I wonder how hard it would be to have a series of bots that harvest posts from other social media sites, add a little 'human' LLM magic to it, and make it look like actual people are posting lots of content?

[rusticpenn]

We had at least 2 instances of users supporting admin decisions which looked like responses from chatgpt in r/programmerhumor yesterday.

[rusticpenn]

By that time, these guys will cash out and leave.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits from—are, as far as I can tell, more likely to get a lot angrier about abusive corporate nonsense, simply because they're more invested.

I suspect strongly that these people have been purged already over the past 2-3 years. You simply don't hear much about it, because de-platforming them muzzles most of them, and if anyone does complain elsewhere it's easy to smear them as Nazis or whatnot. I mean, they can't effectively defend themselves against that sort of lie when reddit has scrubbed their comment history from anyone else's view.

[matkoniecz]

Your claim that currently noone posts on Reddit and moderates Reddit is wrong and they were purged is wrong.

[ImaCake]

Those people aren't common on the default subreddits, which might make it feel like there is not much community. But in the places that count, the more niche communities that actually have real community, those people are still around.

Besides, its a question of scale. There are loads of people like myself who make effort-post/comments sporadically on a few different platforms. There is enough such people that there can be (and is!) several viable twitter-like platforms at the moment. There's no reason the same can't be true for reddit.

[balder1991]

I commented about a month back how the /r/programming seemed dead in the last two years compared to Hacker News. It’s not even close to what it used to be, and I suspect the new design and other bad choices contributed to that. It’s like the really good programmers who made interesting comments I learned from left. But of course I was downvoted and someone said HN users are “probably inept nerds like me”.