this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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Reddit is too big to fail, they have achieved critical mass. Keep in mind facebook is still around despite being a reviled company, and instagram certainly hasn't had a mass migration off of the platform either.
At the end of the day Lemmy isn't a replacement to reddit yet. It depends entirely upon it getting traction which thus far still hasn't occurred - we are not at critical mass yet. I hope it happens but there are many reasons why this site could fail even after reddit's admin blunders. Too many people are apathetic to the changes and not all of them are lurkers who do not post or comment.
Today you can't just stop using reddit either, especially for google searches. Too much content is ONLY on reddit. It's a huge problem. We really need a wikipedia style reddit where it's not for profit and still moderated for content.
Facebook rebranded to Meta and burned $13 billion on the "metaverse" to stay relevant. So, Facebook doesn't seem to think that Facebook will be around forever. Reddit does have critical mass, which is an advantage for them. There's not denying that. But, it's their advantage to waste by being overly aggressive and greedy, which they seem to be happy to do.
As for Google searches, it might be less that Reddit is so valuable for search and more that Google has become so bad at providing good search results that Reddit became the go between. There's a lot of very specific knowledge on Reddit, but there's also a lot of redirects from Reddit comments to outside sources that have the info that a Google search should be able to provide. I don't know if Google has the will to fix that problem though. If Reddit can "get back to normal" and continue being Google's sidekick, Google might be happy to return to the status quo. But, once a company like Reddit adopts the policy that "the beatings will continue until morale improves," it's hard to imagine how they can get back to "normal."
At some point it'll be easier for Google to buy reddit for the content than to unfuck their own search engine. Bonus points because they can tell themselves they fixed it for good and keep making google search even shittier.
I have wondered if some of the big players interested in AI might decide to buy or recreate (again) something like Reddit so that they just have the data and control it. Google owns Youtube, so they are already managing the liability that comes with moderating a social media platform.