1 upvotes, 0 direct replies (showing 0)
You want Reddit to be a particular sort of site, but you aren't willing to make it that site. Wanting it and wishing for it isn't going to make you any happier when it isn't.
It's owned by Conde Nast.
That's fine and all, but this reaction should shock no one.
Hell, if [I] had a company that got as much traffic and ad revenue as this place, I'd behave in exactly the same way. In fact, I'd be banning subreddits I didn't like left and right, year round. That's because I want to stay in business and make as much money as possible...I don't want to be shut down!!!
But that's the catch: You can't be claiming to be THE place for discussion of all things if that obviously isn't true. So Reddit needs to stop portraying itself as that. Maybe Reddit needs an overhaul, to shrink down considerably in scope. Instead of having THOUSANDS of subreddits, choose 100. And instead of letting people just link to and post whatever they want, maybe make things based on level and rank (the longer and better poster you are, the more trusted your content is to post immediately BEFORE anyone looks at it). (Horrible nightmares of MrBabyMan's return!)
This, of course, is what happened to Digg. They were a giant site, but made a few key changes to content posting and site structure and within 6 months most big users had jumped ship. In the next 12-18 mos. most other Digg users followed.
Inevitably, Reddit will have to scale down to something super small and almost useless, or outright fail. There are a lot of smart people here, and most smart people know when they're being lied to. Eventually, enough pissed off CS majors and marketing folk will realize what Digg and Reddit has made isn't rocket science technically...it's just mindshare among web traffic.
And once Reddit's mindshare among its active users is shattered, the whole thing will collapse.
There's really no other outcome. It either shrinks considerably on its own, with stricter content moderation...........or users make something else and jump ship. Luckily for Reddit, there's no other 'ship" to jump to at the moment.
There's nothing here!