Reddit is mostly lurkers. I’m (well, was) one of them. People get thousands of upvotes, but not thousands of replies.
When mods lose the tooling that they need and spam maybe starts slipping through, I expect one of two things (or both) will happen:
A) They blame the mods. Doesn’t matter if it’s new mods or old ones. They’ll say the old ones are doing it on purpose because they “lost the protest” and the new ones “don’t know what they’re doing and only want the power”.
B) Traffic dips slowly. Very slowly. There might be a major drop in a couple of days, but it’ll rise up to similar levels once people are “fuck it” and use the official app. That’s what reddit’s counting on, and they’re not wrong. I’m guessing the amount of people who leave permanently is significantly lower than the amount of people who “just want to use reddit”.
I also expect reddit to fuck up again. Every few years, they do and alienate a bunch of users. I doubt it’ll be a major, site-killing fuck up, but there’s probably going to be “waves” in which a portion ditches the site. They’ll typically gain enough users to make up for it, but quality will probably get worse over time.
It’s funny because I’m guessing a bunch of people who right now are all “don’t know why you’re complaining” will be loudly protesting when reddit does some other shit and suddenly those people will be hearing “don’t know why you’re complaining”. Cycle continues.
I’m not sure. Normally, most users would come back as you describe. But if the lack of mods gets too serious, then most users will begin to get bored or annoyed. If other platforms scale up well, boredom translates into “I heard about…”
100%.
Reddit is mostly lurkers. I’m (well, was) one of them. People get thousands of upvotes, but not thousands of replies.
When mods lose the tooling that they need and spam maybe starts slipping through, I expect one of two things (or both) will happen:
A) They blame the mods. Doesn’t matter if it’s new mods or old ones. They’ll say the old ones are doing it on purpose because they “lost the protest” and the new ones “don’t know what they’re doing and only want the power”.
B) Traffic dips slowly. Very slowly. There might be a major drop in a couple of days, but it’ll rise up to similar levels once people are “fuck it” and use the official app. That’s what reddit’s counting on, and they’re not wrong. I’m guessing the amount of people who leave permanently is significantly lower than the amount of people who “just want to use reddit”.
I also expect reddit to fuck up again. Every few years, they do and alienate a bunch of users. I doubt it’ll be a major, site-killing fuck up, but there’s probably going to be “waves” in which a portion ditches the site. They’ll typically gain enough users to make up for it, but quality will probably get worse over time.
It’s funny because I’m guessing a bunch of people who right now are all “don’t know why you’re complaining” will be loudly protesting when reddit does some other shit and suddenly those people will be hearing “don’t know why you’re complaining”. Cycle continues.
I’m not sure. Normally, most users would come back as you describe. But if the lack of mods gets too serious, then most users will begin to get bored or annoyed. If other platforms scale up well, boredom translates into “I heard about…”