BreadDog

A part of me believes they will give some bs reason to keep their “scab” mods immune, but I would love if they didn’t and the chaos that would ensue.

To be honest, 2023 has feel relatively calmer than the past few, I guess covid being that all encompassing to life. Of the things on your list I do think AI is probably the first thing that comes to mind when I think of what we are “on the brink of”. This leap that happened the past couple years in LLM was shocking enough, wondering what the next couple are going to look like.

Ernest might have also gotten up more servers to handle the load, noticing that cloudflare is off and we are federating again (this is a beehaw thread)

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.

Though this will take some time getting used to.

I literally just joined. I think the major instances should put some sort of “Reddit Refugee Guide”. I just joined on kbin, and I’m pretty technical so I’m naturally interested in how things work and figuring it out myself, but I think the vast majority of people won’t be, and will just want to know how they can do the basic social media features.

CGP Grey’s “What is reddit” comes to mind.