Reddit is a Dying Mall
Reddit is a Dying Mall
This is two months old and a report about the exodus that’s already happened.
Reddit didn’t die, it probably won’t anytime soon.
Exactly. From the article:
As far as Reddit’s fate is concerned I predict that what will happen to it is the same thing that is happening to Twitter and has already happened to Facebook and frankly, actual shopping malls. The business side of things will churn along divorced from the content which will become ever more generic and culturally irrelevant. The users who stay on Reddit will be of the unadventurous variety, not inclined to make waves or analyze their habits.
That’s just a horrible analogy. Yes malls are basically dead but still technically better. Reddit is just as popular and active as it has ever been. Sure some people, like us, left. The vast majority stayed.
The ‘mass exodus’ never happened. The entirety of lemmy put together is the size of a small niche sub barely anyone actually knows about.
Yeah it is not a good analogy because when it came to malls something more convenient and easier for everyone to use became a better option with the rise in internet shopping. It’s not like malls made people angry and people left it for something that wasn’t as convenient to use.
People who moved to the fediverse aren’t representative of the average user who just wants a community in a niche area of interest to use, and never cared that strongly enough to abandon it. Most do not want to go through the growing pains of trying to grow a new community on a new platform and less content.
I remember describing to my mom what Facebook was becoming back in like 2013/14 and she goes “Huh, sounds like what happened with email.”
The service went from useful communication to social media style chain forwarding nonsense pretty quickly, and they went the same way with FB.
Fuck yeah email!
Good thing we got that sorted in the early stages of internet before corporations got their hands on it. Otherwise we’d have to create separate accounts to send and receive emails from gmail, outlook, and yahoo.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/443332/reddit-monthly-visitors/
Their traffic is unaffected. Reddit has never been part of the public conversation, outside of its reused content on blogs and autogenerated YouTube content. It has never had cultural relevance due to its conspicuously self contained nature, despite its size. Shops have closed but are reopening and profits are consistent(ly absent) month to month, the exodus affected little. If I were to amend your title, it would read “Reddit has always been a dying mall.”
You’ve described the situation as dramatically as possible to the crowd most excited to hear it and I’m just tired of hearing “Reddit is dying.” It is exhausting. The article is a great summary of everything I hate about Reddit because it is intended to be.
Edit: OP downvoted everyone who disagreed with him.
Sigh. Please OP, we're not doing that here. Downvotes should be reserved for trolls and the counterproductive. This comment with its snappy "kick the puppy that is your opinion" is not the most productive, but there are downvotes from OP on way more innocuous things, even one comment that agrees reddit is dying but in a different way than the linked article envisions.
Please leave that behavior on reddit.
You’re already going in the wrong direction by expecting Lemmy or any of its instances to try to be the gold standard. The whole point of a federated system is that we can have multiple points of entry into this space if one site should go down or become otherwise toxic to its user base.
AKA don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
mander.xyz is awesome, if you select by local you only get science posts from communities that are visited and commented on. programming.dev has some good communities too, that probably need some good comments and content so people don’t give up on them.
You need to pick your home instance well to have a good head start, otherwise, you’ll spend every day blocking communities that take up space in you discovery feed when you select by “all”.
There are plenty of budding communities in the federation. The Reddit and X posts are slowing down, so that is nice. Not so long ago, Lemmy was absolutely flooded by /c/memes, but other activity has started to balance it out.
An even better sign is that OC NSFW creators are showing up here more and more. Where they go, people follow, no questions asked.
I started a new job a few months ago and was on my first business trip with four colleagues recently. To make conversation I asked if anyone used Reddit.
• Two dudes had heard of it but never used it. • One dude said he uses it infrequently because it’s turned to shit. • One dude said fuck Reddit and it’s API bullshit. • I said fuck Reddit and it’s API bullshit.
Thats my anecdote. 100% of the people in that car didn’t use Reddit or now hated it. Probably 3 months ago that same car ride would have had three people loving Reddit and advocating it to the other two.
Despite your experience it’s alive and well. If reddit is a dying mall what is Lemmy? To scale it’s like an unmaintained Porta potty.
I hate reddit, but let’s not be ridiculous. It’s more than fine. Google has really gone to shit. When people search for things they put in site=reddit as a more reliable way to find real information.