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by Macha 1941 days ago
Yeah, when they follow Twitter and lock down third party apps will end half my Reddit usage and turning off old Reddit the other half.

I would have said in the past that users like me who are resistant to introducing engagement mechanics/monetisation are why they're valued less than the likes of Twitter but recent stats I saw indicated old Reddit was like 15% of desktop users and the official app also had the majority of mobile users so looks like their plan to wait our the dilution of the long term user base is working so maybe that all changes in a few years.

The unbundling suggestions seem like it'd hurt the long tail, a lot of the value that Reddit has to me is the smaller specialised communities which are able to get users because people can eventually get introduced to smaller subreddits from larger subreddits. Cut off that traffic growth path and many of these communities have a much reduced reason to set up on Reddit Vs elsewhere.

The suggestions to move the focus from subreddits to users - it's something Reddit are subtly trying with redesigned profiles and more emphasis on people posting to profiles or following them, but to me it seems counter productive to what I like about Reddit. A subreddit can be kept on topic in a way a user cannot, and actually in many social circles there are pressures on people to make their views known on e.g. politics in twitter, where staying on whatever topic is actually discouraged

2 comments

I too am one of those users. I migrated to hackernews, but as you said, reddit offers much more in terms of communities around topics. These communities are absolute goldmines and, to me, it appears that they are the remnants of late 90s to late 2000s internet. I really liked the warez, infosec and hacker* communities of those times, unfortunately, I was too young and to be honest, I haven't gotten around to looking for such communities again.
Reddit is a monetization of Usenet.

The farther they drift away from admitting that, the more tenuous their value proposition is going to be.

> but recent stats I saw indicated old Reddit was like 15% of desktop users

I have to believe that's the vast majority of the active userbase, and that Reddit just gets a lot of one off visits from Google search referrals.