• Jorgelhus@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    But, you see, the biggest problem here is: these generic users do not post anything. They may repost from Instagram or Tik Tok, or whatever, but if the power users, the ones responsible for the good content that the casual access leaves, it’s just a matter of months for it to die for good.

    • Overzeetop@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I think years instead of months, but the rest is spot on. 30M pics users and 50k voted on the Sexy John Oliver change. 0.16% engagement on one of the highest traffic subs. So much of the front page has become tiktok it just a matter of time before people get their content direct from the source. The rest are news stories with the same arguments over and over again (ChatGPT and comment repost bots are already driving those) and reposted videos and memes from the last decade.

      I’m still convinced that Google is driving a great deal of traffic to the site due to the depth of problem solving in old posts. I got a comment or DM every week or two thanking me for a solution I’d posted 3, 5, even 7 years prior. Those are all deleted now, and I’m keeping my account to regularly purge any restored content. If the top 100k-200k posters deleted their content, many google searches would lead to a dead end. Eventually it will end up like pinterest - you’ll put -site:reddit.* in your search (or add an extension to do so) just to avoid getting the useless results.

      A site a large as reddit doesn’t die overnight, any more than Digg, Twitter, Usenet, or any other platform that is past its prime. But it certainly doesn’t bode well for the future value or IPO success.

      • ferociousfloof@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        I agree, memes are fun but they won’t keep a site alive. Reddit had it all which is what made it so compelling. You could catch up on some news between the memes while still keeping tabs on the current meta for Hearthstone.

        When I “left” Slashdot for Reddit it was the depth of the site that made it so interesting. Slashdot was just people who were commenting on articles vs Reddit that had whole communities based on just about everything.

        Reddit may recover to a degree but once the 3rd party apps fully die and people are forced to suffer the Reddit built app alone on mobile I think we will really start to see what kind of trends will emerge.

      • Jon-H558@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        due to the way statistics works if you can get a truly random sample then a sample of 9600 voters can predict the US presidential election to an accuracy of 99%

        • Solemn@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          1 year ago

          The problem is getting a truly random sample though. The subset of users who voting on those polls probably includes a decent number of angry folks watching for news on such protests here on Lemmy or other platforms, and excludes a lot of people just scrolling for funny pictures

    • quirzle@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      And the mods are the ones that fight the phishing scams, disinformation bots, t-shirt spammers, etc. If reddit were capable of automating those away, they wouldn’t still be so prevalent.

      I straight up don’t believe reddit staff is as technically competent as those at Meta/IG or TikTok. They can’t pull it off without a volunteer army filling in the capabilities gap.