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By banning porn. Out of all the things that could motivate people to search for alternatives, this might be the most durable driving factor.
Outside of that I think it will be a slow decline in quality. Eventually quality content will decrease more and more, and low effort memes and bot content will take over.
Soooo what we are basically seeing in real time ATM?
Not with a bang, but a whimper.
I know you're quoting TS Eliot, but this for real. Just like MySpace, Digg, Cracked, and many similar sites, they will still exist for the longest time, but gradually evolve into an entirely unrecognizeable form. Then one day they'll all shut down, and people will react with "the what-it now" and "that's a name I've not heard in a long time."
My money is on slow decline in content quality. It might not ever die per se, it might just become Craigslist or Digg.
That's my guess. They started going down hill when Advice Animals banned the Unpopular Opinion Puffin.
Today I learned Digg still exists.
I don't know the last time I was linked to it, but yes it still does. The fate of some of these things is to eventually transition to a living museum, if they don't die out for long enough. Like the Space Jam website.
IPO -> billionaire purchase -> enshittification -> never dies but sucks forever
The same way it happened with digg: Clear turn against user interests to chase revenue from brands directly, a slow but steady drain of its important users to competitors, a sinking of its stock value, until it is finally acquired by a online brands clearinghouse like Demand Media for parts.
If they survive IPO and the shits storm that will bring, It will be the porn ban. We all know someone with a big wallet is going to push the change eventually.
I think the new preferential treatment in Googles algo will cancel out people leaving due to content getting stale.
This is honestly what I expect to happen. Once the porn is banned, people will stop going there. It has a lot of info for obscure communities and tech communities, but eventually that will start to move to other places.
So, I guess it will slowly die out.
Users migrate to Lemmy..... /s
It gets bought by a different company (possible through majority share acquisition), the new company makes a lot of changes (removing NSFW communities, etc) triggering stronger protests than the API changes because it affects more users.
Something new and better and big and reddit-like probably pops up while reddit continue with their enshittyfication, slowly but surely it will die like Digg.
*note: that new thing isn't lemmy but something else by another big corpo, just like Bluesky.
You mean it isn't dead yet? Huh.
It's the walking dead ... it's like someone with an infection that isn't being treated and eventually will develop gangrene, lose a limb, keep living for a while and still recieve no treatment.
The ultime shitty decision they could took, like totally changing the visuals of the website(no more orange, no more gray mascot, etc...)
I know you said it but itβs not going to die completely. Hell, MySpace is still around.
Well, they reached out to me (and many others on-platform) to buy shares in their IPO. Something-something contributor something.
Anyway, no VC worth half their salt will leave money on the table letting essentially the public buy equity at the same price as them.
So that's not a healthy sign for them.
By puffing up the company for the IPO then the class action fraud suit will bankrupt what is left after paying out the CEO.
Social media deaths are so slow and monotonous. I'm expecting something similar to Twitter and even Tumblr, where eventually it ends up in the hands of the only manchild CEO willing to touch it, and they start chasing users away personally.
One evening Reddit, while at a play with his wealthy parents, decided to leave early and went out the side exit into the alley. Unfortunately for Reddit, in this story the ne'er-do-wells shoot the kid, parents were fine and they had more kids after, changing nothing but their name.
They do an IPO and a muskrat becomes the majority shareholder
Pretty similar to what's going on with Twitter right now.
By being bought by another company which then proceeds to discontinue it.
Reddit died, it's a zombie propped up by tech bros like the rest of social media. The end.