I must apologize. I am an ex-Redditor and I made this mistake not 2 days ago. I saw a video posted of a cartoon with a lady who was stealing other people's dogs. I thought it was senseless and lacked any real meaning. I downvoted it. I didn't take the time to read through the rules of the site and I messed up. Luckily, this was the only casualty in my Snapzu-ing and I later changed my vote on that post after seeing a similar thread to this in /t/lounge about down votes.

The point is, these posts act as reminders to us new folk and probably need to keep being posted and upvoted for the next couple of months. I know they helped me figure out this community and am confident that they will help others. So thank you for bringing it up and reminding us newbies. :)

This is a heavy subject. I, personally, find FPH disgusting and awful. I don't want it to exist anywhere, to be honest. However, I think, given what has happened to Reddit, free speech needs to be protected. If people want to make a FPH tribe and other people want to join it, so be it. I certainly wont be subscribing to their content but censorship will lead to another mass-exodus to another site. Voat is already getting the majority of ex-Redditors, we don't need to give people more reason to skip over Snapzu.

As a caveat, there should be zero tolerance for witch-hunts and harassment. I hold the controversial opinion that Pao actually made the right move by banning FPH. Not because it was a morally detestable sub but because they were personally attacking people IRL. They were harassing people. This is not OK and will get the site in legal trouble if it allows this kind of behavior. Snapzu would be wise to learn from this whole debacle.

Oh gosh. Yes, this is a problem. BUT, I have a suggestion on how to handle it, if you will:

The last thing we want to do is discourage people from posting comments and content. That being said, negative stimulus may not be the best method of addressing this issue. Perhaps we could make it a point to respond to lack-luster comments politely asking them to expound on their thoughts.

Example: A user replies to this thread with

Sure thing, gov'nah. tips fedora

A good reply might be:

So you agree with the poster? What do you think is an appropriate way to encourage more discussion in the comments and deter single-sentence, meaningless replies?

This method may not be sure-fire but I think it would promote more discussion and offer a second chance to those who reply with bland comments.

There is no doubt in my mind that this influx due to the AMAgeddon on Reddit is a sign of Reddit's final decline. The numbers are staggering. If you check /r/blackout2015, you will see a post detailing the site visit counts and web page rankings. Reddit dropped 9 places this weekend in the rankings and shows a significant loss in traffic.

I think this will get worse as more mods and content creators leave the site. The content creators are what fuel traffic on Reddit, without them the site becomes a tired, hollow, experience that serves to merely echo what has already been posted on other sites.

After the initial shockwave (should be over soon), we should see the exodus slow down but keep trickling off until the company can no longer justify keeping the servers up. This will take a good while, probably a year or so, but will be the end of Reddit. The only thing I can see derailing this would be Ellen Pao getting fired. That one action could completely revive the site.

For those questioning, I did not simply pull this out of my rear-end... but I kind of did. My analysis is based on traffic patterns, my own experience, and the great Digg fall. It is, by no means, a solid fact but I feel that there is enough evidence for it to be a valid prediction. Based on the information, this is where I see things headed.