Probably a PCMag puff piece placed by a marketing firm for Reddit. Happens a lot.
Some people like to be abused.
IMO, I don’t see reddit ever going back to what it was even a year ago. Like many other lurkers I didn’t actively post much on reddit, but I used it a ton for searches. Reddit was (and still is to a much lesser extent) a great place to find support or posts that might address an obscure problem you have with tech in general. Trying that today gives me mixed results at best. Subs are private or the replies that were helpful are now deleted. A lot of the search results that you might’ve found before don’t actually show up because the user deleted their account and/or posts. Its far less useful for this purpose than it was even a few months ago and I think we’ll see traffic start to reflect that pretty soon.
I used to get what I needed from BBSs. Then it was AOL boards and Usenet. Then Slashdot. Then Reddit.
People want to gather. There will always be another community.
This is a very short-sighted way of looking at things. The real crunch will come on June 30th when the third party apps stop working. That will cause many people to switch away from Reddit or at least reduce their usage. Also, the current shenaigans will have a long term negative effect on the quality of moderation and thus the quality of content. And people will think twice about putting a lot of effort into producing content. They’ve been on a downward slope in this regard for a long time but this will only accelerate it.
I’d like to think this is true, but I think it remains to be seen. It may end up being that most users end up deciding to just accept the new normal and reddit pretty much weathers this storm without enough blowback to make a difference.
Several communities have been effectively nuked by the mods changing rules and/or setting the subs to NSFW (with actual NSFW following that move).
Unless Reddit rolls them back to what they were 2-3 weeks ago (which might be a possibility), I’m not sure if there’s any going back.
