I think that it’ll be gradually killed, over a period of two years.
A few key events that I predict:
The code for the old interface will stop being maintained, with shareholders babbling something like optimisation of working hours. Engineers explicitly hired to maintain that interface will get fired, if they weren’t already.
Once some bug appears in some feature of the old interface, the feature will be simply removed, in the dirtiest way, causing even more bugs. Recursively.
Mod tools will be removed from the old interface regardless of bugs, under some bullshit claim like “think on the children!”.
Links to old.reddit will be automatically redirected towards the new interface. You can only choose the old interface in the settings. This effectively prevents people not logged into Reddit from using the old interface.
Reddit popularity drops, and alongside it the ad revenue. Shareholders are fuming, and looking for the next “bright” idea to counter the drop in ad revenue. It’ll be to rework the new interface again, so it’s filled with even more ads. They’ll see a short spike in ad revenue, justifying the move… followed by a sharp drop.
Analysis on what caused that sharp drop on ad revenue shows that the usage of the old interface actually increased. Shareholders will be fuming, and demand that the old interface should be killed. And thus shall it be.
Reddit is mainstream now. The reason they will kill old reddit is because they can. You have to understand that reddit has outgrown its initial audiance. In fact, us leaving is probably saving reddit money because we didnt consume ads. Kids these days use reddit through the main app and are used to consuming tons of ads in all their social apps.
Redsit will “die” in spirit but I’m 100% it won’t go away. The way Lemmy keeps predicting.
You don’t need popularity dropping at the start, as long as advertisement revenue drops. It could be due to an increase of usage of ad blockers, or lower prices per ad. Or even shareholders “feeling” that they aren’t getting enough profits.
That said, I do believe that Reddit will become less popular in the near future (1~2y from now). It’ll roughly follow the same path as Twitter, but faster - because unlike Twitter, Reddit doesn’t revolve around a few key individuals that anchor the others; it revolves around the content, even for the “lol lmao” phoneposting kids.
But that’s the thing. The new users arr mostly kids on their phones. Most users now browser reddit through the official app. So almost no one is blocking ads. It doesnt even matter if the content is trash or reposts or bots. People love that. That sort of content is immensely successful on other sites like instagram. Reddit will just become another content farm with no soul that prints money.
As a content farm Reddit is outcompeted. Reddit’s differential used to be the content quality, brought by another demographic than those kids. But once that demographic is gone, so is the differential, thus the other demographic.
(Or: why would I bother with the reddit app if the IG app shows the same thing, but more?)
Has spaz sold it all and disappeared yet? I figured it was a stage coach robbery situation. Reddit died June 10th according to my whitelist firewall. The microbes don’t die at the same time as the cadaver, but the survivors move on to a new host fast.
He already sold over 500.000 shares, same as his CFO iirc. Classic pump and dump. Reddit is 25% down, below initial value. From an article I read today.
It’s already dead for me. It used to be the only way I could access random reddit links with my VPN, now it too gives that stupid rejection page.
So, reddit was dead to me, but now it’s extra dead to me because I’m not disabling my VPN just to view some link. If friends send me a reddit link, I’ll just ask for a screenshot.
Instead of replacing the www with old, you can replace the www. with “safe”.
SafeReddit.com (easiest LibReddit/RedLib mirror to ‘member). While it lasts :-/ (see: Invidious getting hit by limits today, Instagram being hardcore anti-Bibliogram…)
I feel like they’re not going to outright kill it, but quill instead let it wither on the vine; aka die the death of a thousands cuts.
There will likely be more new functionality that won’t be backported. Things that work okay now will stop functioning correctly. They’ll just stop maintenance and wait for everyone to leave — when it does get shut down, it will happen with a whimper rather than a bang.
Ooh shit, this is a good take! Tiktok needs to change ownership to an American company. I could see them using Reddit as a kind of masquerade it or shell company, where they put all the legal and geographical ownership under the Reddit name, but really all the decisions (for both platforms) are being made by the TikTok owners.
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