This is what I've expected for a while, especially after how the community reacted and recovered from the FPH drama. I don't think reddit is going anywhere anytime within the next few months, maybe even a year or so. There is not going to be some epic mass drop-off of users like digg. It is going to be a slow departure of content creators. Trust and loyalty is something that is extraordinary hard to build on a website and reddit has lost a LOT of it. The amount they have lost from their most loyal sections of their fanbase is almost irreversible with a great admin team, and the current admin team is currently seeming quite subpar. Since they've lost that trust, ever single mistake they make will slowly cause more and more people to depart. Eventually, people will have no reason to be providing their content to the site and will leave for greener pastures, and the people who only come to consume that content will follow the creators, not the site.
That's been my general philosophy watching all of this drama happen. Morally, I could care less about FPH. I don't know Victoria as a person, and while I wish her the best, I have no emotional investment in her employment at reddit. I don't care about the mod tools there because I was never a mod of a subreddit more than 10 or so large. However, it has seriously made me question putting my content there. I think the admins handled the banning of FPH terrible and treated the members as uninterested consumers rather than a dedicated fanbase. I think the way they handled the Victoria situation was extremely unprofessional and makes me doubt the forward-thinking of the staff. The fact that they have promised mod tools for years and never followed through shows a lack of interest in the actual community and its requests. I understand they have apologized, but that doesn't make up for the fact that they have ignored their community for literally years. Why should I trust that they are suddenly going to change after years of saying they are and not.
So in essence, I distrust the admins. I distrust reddit as a business. Why should I spend my free time building a community there if I don't trust them to actually work with me in return. So over there, I'm no longer a content creator. I'm just a content consumer. And the moment the rest of the content creators jump ship, I'm not turning back.
This is what I've expected for a while, especially after how the community reacted and recovered from the FPH drama. I don't think reddit is going anywhere anytime within the next few months, maybe even a year or so. There is not going to be some epic mass drop-off of users like digg. It is going to be a slow departure of content creators. Trust and loyalty is something that is extraordinary hard to build on a website and reddit has lost a LOT of it. The amount they have lost from their most loyal sections of their fanbase is almost irreversible with a great admin team, and the current admin team is currently seeming quite subpar. Since they've lost that trust, ever single mistake they make will slowly cause more and more people to depart. Eventually, people will have no reason to be providing their content to the site and will leave for greener pastures, and the people who only come to consume that content will follow the creators, not the site.
That's been my general philosophy watching all of this drama happen. Morally, I could care less about FPH. I don't know Victoria as a person, and while I wish her the best, I have no emotional investment in her employment at reddit. I don't care about the mod tools there because I was never a mod of a subreddit more than 10 or so large. However, it has seriously made me question putting my content there. I think the admins handled the banning of FPH terrible and treated the members as uninterested consumers rather than a dedicated fanbase. I think the way they handled the Victoria situation was extremely unprofessional and makes me doubt the forward-thinking of the staff. The fact that they have promised mod tools for years and never followed through shows a lack of interest in the actual community and its requests. I understand they have apologized, but that doesn't make up for the fact that they have ignored their community for literally years. Why should I trust that they are suddenly going to change after years of saying they are and not.
So in essence, I distrust the admins. I distrust reddit as a business. Why should I spend my free time building a community there if I don't trust them to actually work with me in return. So over there, I'm no longer a content creator. I'm just a content consumer. And the moment the rest of the content creators jump ship, I'm not turning back.