Comment by Fyrezerk

> On the contrary, I see Reddit as being extremely difficult to replace, precisely because of those 17 years of investment by users.

I said its "never been easier to replace", which is different than "easy to replace".

If Reddit continues to drive its most invested users and moderators off the platfrom, it becomes significantly easier. But even with continued bad choices by leadership, Reddit will likely follow the Flickr path: Gently coasting into irrelevance, selling itself once or twice along the way.

My prediction: Reddit will ultimately be bought for its corpse^H^H^H^H^H corpus of text content, and so will live forever through LLMs. People of 2073 will wonder why their bots occasionally reply, "Thanks for the gold, kind stranger!"

It's a bit of both. The wealth of knowledge in Reddit would be extremely difficult to replace. But that history isn't exactly what keeps people on reddit or helps perpetuate the platform, it's just a valuable goldmine of information.

That history doesn't keep the platform going though. People and networks will migrate to a new platform, start building a new knowledge base, and reddit will slowly rot

> migrate to another platform

I don't think this is the biggest threat. Twitter, being a unitary platform, mainly has to worry about other platforms, or protocols that masquerade as single platforms.

But Reddit is built up of many communities. The 17 years of history is pretty valuable to Reddit, Inc, of course. Lots of long-tail search eyeballs. But the people actually generating that valuable information are generally focused on the latest discussion, not the history. I think the threat here is the various communities going other places. One by one or in pieces, scattered across many sites and tools.

As a proof of concept here, look at patriots.win, birthed from /r/The_Donald: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald#Patriots.win

It's just not that hard to set up an online forum. Reddit captured those many communities because it was even easier, and because Reddit Inc acted as good stewards. We'll see how this plays out, but I could easily see Reddit being permanently diminished due to its execs unintentionally triggering an open-web rebirth of the independent forum.

> On the contrary, I see Reddit as being extremely difficult to replace, precisely because of those 17 years of investment by users. Reddit is a gold mine of information related to any topic you can imagine, and that information won't magically migrate to another platform without serious network traction by a large user base.

It doesn't have to. An archive won't save Reddit if the action wants to move elsewhere.

If a particular topical community gets going somewhere else, the most popular information will quickly get recreated just through its normal operation.

I used to use Reddit for this purpose, but many of the things I’d try to look up on Reddit, I can more readily ask ChatGPT about. This form of network effect of reddit will likely weaken over time.

Edit: So in some sense all that information has magically migrated to a new platform through the mystical power of DL.

Yet we won’t lose that history if Reddit loses its users and mods. New history will be found in the same place as old - surfaced via Google (discord excluded).