Reddit is a Dying Mall

JustinHanagan@kbin.social to Technology@lemmy.world – 759 points –
staygrounded.online
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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.

Facebook never "died", but no one goes there anymore either. Reddit will be the same.

What is Facebook these days? My grandma spends all day on it, she hardly speaks...just swiping...when I sneak a peek, it's just chain-mail-like bullshit one after the other with a few disguised ads for things she can't afford in between...ugh :vomit:

lol, exactly. that is literally reddit for me now as well

Yea, I checked worldnews today: there are these bot-like irrelevant comments on major subs, small subs abandoned...askhistorians is a little slow...maybe people are just on holiday having fun and such :D, is instagram full of holiday bragging?

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.

And still email is not dead yet! I hope it's starting to become clear to people that protocols last much longer than platforms, even if platforms look like they can test new things faster.

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.

I don't know about that, email is still great at what it does. It's less that it died and more that people moved on to more real-time communication that fit their needs better, with email still being used for what it is actually good for.

Oh absolutely, it's still highly used in a professional environment. I just feel like personal email went through the same thing and now that social media exists it's just another way to communicate again.

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It’s a haven for some older gen x and boomers. That was peak social media for them and that’s where they keep in touch mostly.

When I go to the poker machine hall, it’s the same. Keep pressing the button waiting for that all-too-elusive ‘win’ to come around.

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Isn't Digg still around? It will exist forever probably, but it is definitely a husk of its former self.

Digg fully died, but the name was brought back for a curated news portal years later.

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Malls are still around in some places too, but nothing in there is worth going to. Maybe Mall of America if you want to chance getting stabbed or shot, other than that they're either glorified office space or entirely abandoned. But, like reddit, they're still technically there.

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 there. 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.

My city has malls. They are just big buildings for housing an aunties anne's pretzels, a filthy play area for kids, and any other sucker who is still renting a retail space.

My local mall has churches that rent out the retail space. It's a weird stort of community center.

The mall pictured in the article, Rolling Acres Mall in Akron OH, was the largest of three indoor shopping malls in the greater Akron area. I don't know if you've ever been to Akron, but we didn't need three goddamn indoor shopping malls. We're down to just one now, which seems appropriate.

Who knows. Could be the new Facebook. Feel like that shit fell off pretty fast. Went from everyone on the planet using it to only your weird uncle pretty quickly.

Dying or not, their leadership made clear the plan is full steam towards enshittification and monetization, so leaving early is for the best.

Reddit has really declined after the blackout, some subs are not even posting anything usefull or just trolling. My home subs on reddit dies out after i scroll past 500, no more new or upvoted content.

About as long as a seagull pecking away at a whale carcass. It certainly didn’t help them but it would take Musk level of stupid to end them.

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