I’ve never been sentimental about a social media site but it’s sad for me to see reddit so clearly killing itself. Pushshift is already banned and Apollo is soon to follow. Reddit will either pivot fully to a mainstream audience or die out. It’s just sad for me to see it doing it to itself.
I’ve been using Reddit since around mid-2009 (pre-Digg exodus). In my honest opinion, the signs of decline on Reddit have been bubbling for a while, and that’s forgoing any consideration of operational/executive decisions that have been made along the way.
Don’t get me wrong, Reddit even in 2009 wasn’t a consistent bastion of quality, productive, insightful discussion, and a good amount of posts on the frontpage on a given day were memes (not to say those are inherently “bad” posts; peak f7u12 anyone?). But the discussions that were had were, for the most part, friendly and/or constructive in some meaningful way. Over the years though, as the userbase grew and the site became increasingly “mainstream,” I noticed there was an uptick of either one or both of two things: 1) low effort posts/comments and 2) sheer vitriol in discussions.
When you combine those two things, you get what – in my opinion – is a social media platform with high levels of “engagement” that VCs/execs love to tout and leverage (see Reddit’s recent IPO ambitions), but ultimately, a platform that’s merely a shell of what it once used to be.
As that happened, I found myself using Reddit less as a “fun” social media platform and more as a tool – using it for discussions and/or information about niche hobbies, interests, news topics, etc. While the dominance of forums in that area may have been overtaken by subreddits over the years, I don’t think there was anything particularly unique about what Reddit as a platform was doing to help these sort of communities exist, and I really doubt that Reddit will be the last place these communities can thrive.