I have to say, well written article (too bad they only mentioned Beehaw and not Lemmin). Reddit cannot exist without user content and more importantly the moderators who do a hard job for free.
Without moderators, subreddits simply become a free for all, the far west.
Five days ago I wrote Reddit’s future is exactly one of:
Looks like we’re going for option #3.
Due respect but that is hella optimistic. None of that is going to happen. Reddit is huge. During digg’s downfall, their traffic plummeted by 33% in a month. Reddit’s traffic went down only 6% during the height of the blackouts and is already pretty much back to normal.
I kinda disagree. This is my conjecture, but I think the majority of users are ultracasual lurkers who rarely create content or even comment. I suspect that the people who use 3rd party clients are more likely to be the ones who create content, moderate communities, and are just more involved overall. Losing those users will be a big blow to content creation. They’re effectively killing the birds who lay the golden eggs.
I don’t think it’s going to disappear overnight like Digg. I think the most likely situation is Reddit loses a lot of the unique communities, but ultimately they’ll keep the memes and videos and constant reposts and have fresh content on the homepage every day, which is all a lot of casual users care about.
Growth will slow, many of the communities that were really special will fade away or relocate. But they’ll still have memes and reposts so they’ll still have users.
They’ll push that slowly contracting userbase harder and harder to make money. Once they pull the plug on third party apps that paves the way for other changes. NSFW and old.reddit have to be next.
I think they’ll start blocking search engines too, like most social networks do. That will be an absolute travesty as for the last year or so Reddit search results (on google/etc, obviously not Reddit’s actual search, which is horrible) has been a small bastion of useful information amongst a sea of worthless AI generated Amazon affil spam listicle bullshit. (I’m going to be sooo pissed if they do that)
I also wrote something along those lines a few days ago. Lots of predictions over a long time span, but it seems pretty realistic with the direction the site has been going for years now.