[itishappy]

I may be missing your point, but Wikipedia and most big subreddits have proven quite effective at growing and surviving.

I'd also suggest a major distinction between type 1 and type 2 sites are a focus on creation vs consumption. There's a lot more consumers than producers and, depending on your goals, it might improve the experience for more users by deleting the content of some.

[devmor]

>most big subreddits have proven quite effective at growing and surviving.

That depends on your criteria. If popularity and user engagement are the only important metrics, this is absolutely true.

If however, clarity of purpose and effective moderation are important, I would strongly disagree. From my experience, most big subreddits that used to fulfill a certain niche have devolved into primarily meta-posting and stealth (or not stealth at all) advertisement.

Of the exceptions to the above, many now just fill the exact same purpose. There are around 10 extremely large subreddits that regularly make the front page that are essentially just "look at this picture of something I have/something I saw" with no real boundary between them.

[epivosism]

I have heard the editor count at Wikipedia has been shrinking for years. Might have been wrong though

[yorwba]

Monthly active editor count peaked in 2007 and then started declining, but has been quite stable since about 2014: https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org/contributing/...

[epivosism]

That matches what I would expect. My normal continuation would be to look at the growth from 2014 til now in global internet users, and at the competitors like youtube, insta, etc. I'd expect to find that many of these sites grew 100 or 1000x, and that the global online population whose device power and internet service levels surpass some threshold has also grown by at 10x since then.

Those are all assumptions and memories from working during that time period - possibly wrong, would look up if you disagree. But if you don't, then my conclusion would be that staying flat during a period like that - when you could have grown and supported a deep, new, persuasive trend of literacy, fact-based reasoning and understanding, education and compromise - is a huge failure.

[yorwba]

There were 2.79 billion internet users in 2014 https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-internet-users?... so the number couldn't have grown 10x because there are no 27.9 billion humans yet. The latest data is from 2020, so maybe it's at least 2x what it was in 2014.

Most of those new internet users are in Asia and do not use English as their primary language. If you look at editor counts of other Wikipedia editions; Hindi https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/hi.wikipedia.org/contributing/... , Indonesian https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/id.wikipedia.org/contributing/... , Thai https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/th.wikipedia.org/contributing/... , Persian https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/fa.wikipedia.org/contributing/... kept growing after the English Wikipedia saturated.