I’ve never been sentimental about a social media site but it’s sad for me to see reddit so clearly killing itself. Pushshift is already banned and Apollo is soon to follow. Reddit will either pivot fully to a mainstream audience or die out. It’s just sad for me to see it doing it to itself.
Yes and no, as a 12 year vet.
Reddit is not what it was when I joined. Back in the early 2010’s reddit really felt like the internet’s evolution from forums. Not going to pretend it was the first, but it really did feel like something was special about it. The community aspect was really important back then. All of the sudden, it felt like you could literally build a community around anything, with little effort, and the “Build it and they will come” factor would kick in.
But things have spoiled since then. We have over a decade worth of “Eternal Septembers”, and being a redditor turned into “being a redditor” has turned into, we’ll it’s just another part of social media infrastructure. Pretty much everybody I know who has use the site has basically sectioned themselves off from using the site as a a whole and just have their specific subs that they browse. I’m a programmer so I basically just use it for the programming subs and different games I play like OSRS, Factorio, etc.
And I guess, a last thought, I don’t think reddit is going to die from this. I would wager the vast majority of the userbase really doesn’t give a shit, and to be honest, that is fine. Like I said, reddit is part of internet social infrastructure at this point. It’s probably still going to be useful to prefix google searches with “reddit some product” to find the best human reviews of that product. But for me, I don’t really feel the need to keep using it day to day. I’m looking for a community and I can find it elsewhere.