Let's see if it continues through July and August.
I'm hopeful, but there is still a lot of content engagement over on Reddit. It doesn't seem like it's struggling all that much from a surface level observation.
This is (maybe) the "beginning" of the end for Reddit, not the "end" of the end. The big change isn't Reddit, but here.
When Digg fell, everyone moved to Reddit. When this API situation started there was not an obvious new solution to move to. Lemmy/KBin were mentioned but not readily accepted due to concerns with the content and capabilities of the fediverse. That is changing quickly, and the next time Reddit screws up, we will have much more active communities, quality apps, and fewer bugs.
A flood of children at the same time as an exodus of the type of users who actually upload good content to Reddit could definitely set up the conditions for a steady bleed of users away from the site, though. Especially with moderators' ability to actually do their job being impacted by the API changes.
Also worth noting that reddit control the metrics that they release for a lot of this.
There's no real measure of good engagement vs shallow engagement, so they can find a way to show that user visits are up even if the worthwhile content is starting its slow slide. Shit, i probably used to visit reddit once a day for 12 hours, but now i visit 5 times a day when i instinctively enter the URL.
So the metrics that reddit controls are showing that things are going down. How bad must things be that even reddit can't hide it from their metrics now?
If we could truly measure good vs shallow engagement, I wonder how much worse these numbers would be.
It will probably drive away a lot of adults, though. Even if they are unaware of the Fediverse or don’t consider it an acceptable substitute for Reddit, they won’t stay if the threads are dominated by bored teens screwing around.
It’s already bad enough. On my single visit back a few days ago it struck me that the largely ignorant and unperceptive comments I was reading were probably written by kids who were just killing time and didn’t actually have much interest in the topic at hand.
The largest ones like r/pics are still protesting iirc (protest engagement seeming to bring in less ad revenue than normal traffic) and some large ones like r/Minecraft have shutdown. (Someone else made a good point about the biggest subs not having particular tribes and thus the mods are theoretically easier to replace than a smaller knit community - but the ones currently in charge are still trying.)
Engaging over protest content seems to still be hurting reddit where it counts. Some subs have gone completely to normal (and this is what reddit is trying to promote on r/all) but it seems not enough.