[geekpowa]

Audiences are fickle and audiences captured during a websites golden period of explosive growth steadily move away over time.

I am daily fark user for 20+ years. The site certainly is past its prime but this is just the natural lifecycle of many online communities I suspect. I wouldn't characterize it as dead. I wouldn't characterize its decline from peak popularity as caused by user-hostile actions of its owners.

I don't think fark is a useful cautionary tale in context of reddit. Probably a more useful example might be slashdot.

Fark has made changes: with its ux and its moderation policies and implementation of those policies at times, users grumbled.

It's perilous to actively antagonize your audience, to take away things from them that have genuine utility for them. A site dies when you drive away your key content creators and contributors. None of these things happened at Fark I believe.

Another useful example of a site that stepped back from the brink of mass audience exodus is onlyfans and their rolled back attempt to ban adult content.

[a2tech]

My wife and I were both TotalFarkers from the time they introduced it until about 15 years ago when we made the switch to Reddit. The redesign was, and still is, shit. I just logged into my old account (which amazingly still works) and the interface is AWFUL. It was bad before, but its just gotten worse. The level of discourse in the threads (not a great sample, I just clicked on a few) seems not great and very few posts.

[rahidz]

>It's perilous to actively antagonize your audience, to take away things from them that have genuine utility for them. A site dies when you drive away your key content creators and contributors. None of these things happened at Fark I believe.

While it wasn't a key point in me leaving, I switched from Fark to Reddit around the time they started cracking down on Foobies/porn because of "misogyny" and not wanting to offend advertisers.