Nah. A lot of power users are gone. Now it will slowly slide into irrelevance.

Reddit's Google traffic is growing at this time. The only time it was higher was in March 2022, according to SEMrush.

This is because Google is assigning more weight to user-generated content, since the rise of AI-generated content, and I believe traffic will keep growing.

We'll see. Back in 2015 I wrote about how poor moderation and moderator incentives were problems, and yet since then Reddit has kept growing: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/03/16/the-moderator-problem-how....

You can be both large and irrelevant. Facebook is perhaps the best example of this. Reddit feels headed in the same direction.

Facebook is incredibly relevant. It probably has more impact on more people's lives than Twitter or Reddit. Facebook isn't cool anymore. But for the 30+ crowd, especially the non-college educated crowd its huge. Tons of small businesses use it to host their "websites", the community groups are huge, parents / family groups, facebook marketplace totally replaced craigslist for a lot of people.

Define irrelevant, because if it has eyeballs...

If early adopters have moved elsewhere, and it's all late-majority, it will have the most eyeballs right before it dies out.

Facebook has the eyeballs. I don't think it's relevant anymore

What's the criteria for relevancy, if not "do people still use it"?

Are you innovating? Are you top of mind for people? Is your tech transforming people's lives?

I use electricity every day. Is electricity relevant in most contexts for me? Nope. I drive a car every day. Is the type of car I drive relevant in any way? Nope.

Your life as you know it would disappear if electricity stopped flowing tomorrow.

Facebook is no longer the trendsetter but it still influences the daily lives of millions of people and will probably, once again, have a major impact on who the United States next president is. Facebook is highly relevant.

Would your life as you know it disappear if Facebook disappeared tomorrow?

Facebook is a cancer to our society. Luckily it looks like most people moved on an now it's a ghost town.

You're confusing sufficient with necessary. "Your life as you know it will disappear" is an absurd necessary bar to determine if something is relevant or not.

> Luckily it looks like most people moved on an now it's a ghost town.

Ah, you're just unaware of Facebook's DAU/MAU trends. They're not hard to find.

New power users will take their place. The platform is still big and fame. What we've seen is mainly a shift from old to new generation.

Many of the "power users" were outright liabilities for Reddit, and they should consider their departure a good thing.

It depends. When your best content and the filtering of crap content comes from these power users you're in trouble when they leave.

I disagree, they had a lot power users creating the content and now it definitely dropped in quality.

>Maybe if Reddit squeezes more, more users will go to Lemmy and similar alternative platforms?

oh, no worries. We have at least two looming controversies for that upcoming.

1. the contributor program (AKA, get paid to post on reddit) that replaces Reddit Gold that was datamined: https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/25/reddit-will-start-paying-y...

2. the looming hostility towards NSFW content that will likely in the mid term (1-2 years) lead to reddit trying to cut off NSFW material.

It's a matter of being prepared for the next drama instead of if it'll ever happen again.

Lemmy.world has 143k users. For comparison, a now-banned snuff film subreddit made their own website, and it has over 1M users. Lemmy and similar platforms just aren't very appealing to the hordes of people who left reddit. Those users are getting their dopamine fix from somewhere else.

I wrote an article [1] back in June about Lemmy and how reddit communities leaving should approach it but it seems like in practice it's been a lot more unstructured than I thought it should have been. Most users/boards are on lemmy.world. That's probably fine though, there are still some more niche boards. I just wish there was a better automatic cross-posting between parallel boards.

Personally I have essentially not used reddit since June outside of following links there from searches. It was the thing that got me to make an HN account after being a passive reader for like 7 years.

[1] https://tr3y.io/articles/tech/reddit.html

Speaking of "other platforms", I know of a 3D printing sub that went over to Discord and they have no plans to ever go back. I wonder how many other subs headed over to Discord as well.

As much as I like Discord, I hate that people use it as a replacement for reddit.

It's an entirely different medium that serves an entirely different purpose. Reddit is a message board. Discord is chat. A highly-active Discord is impossible to keep up with, whereas a highly active subreddit is still very useable. You can post a question on reddit, go to work, come home many hours later, and read the answers, and it's easy no matter how much traffic the sub gets. On Discord, if it's very active, you could find yourself scouring through hundreds of messages to see if someone replied to you and didn't use the Reply feature.