[midoridensha]

>Care to take bets on how well this will turn out?

I'm betting many communities are going to turn very shitty, but ultimately it won't hurt Reddit's bottom line one iota. In fact, Reddit will probably be more profitable than before.

Just look at TikTok: you don't need communities with intelligent discussion to have a highly profitable company. Instead, it's better to chase vapid morons who want to watch shitty 1-minute videos.

[bbor]

It is my opinion that viewing oneself as a special light in a world of vapid morons leads to a sad, angry life. Just thought I'd weigh in, one vapid moron to another :)

[midoridensha]

The world isn't completely full of vapid morons. There's plenty of intelligent people here, plus there's plenty of intelligent people on various Reddit subs, who are interested in intelligent discourse. There's plenty of popular media that isn't vapid and moronic: just look at Star Trek: it's been a cultural phenomenon for over a half-century and it's rather intellectual for a series aimed at the general public, yet it's rather difficult to find anyone these days who's never heard of it.

There's nothing terribly special about people who are reasonably intelligent and are interested in intelligent discussions about various topics; we're not some vanishingly small minority. Civilization wouldn't have gotten this far if 99% of people were vapid morons. There are a lot of vapid morons out there, as evidenced by the rise of TikTok (and to be fair, not everything there is utter trash), but they're not the overwhelming majority of the population IMO.

[bbor]

I guess my point was less about relative population sizes and more about dismissing the humanity of others. What would einsteins life have been if he had grown up in an abusive, food-insecure household? What about yours (not to assume ofc). Life is hard, conditions are hard, people have subtle undiagnosed disabilities all the time, and I just bristle at dismissing them as more-or-less worthless