I’ve been seeing a lot of angst and emotion on the Reddit migration, which results in either defeatism or blind optimism. In the end, it probably doesn’t matter, but I wanted to do more fact-based research into the subject.
I put my findings and my analysis into what it would actually take to kill Reddit, based on the deaths of Digg and MySpace. tl;dr it’s a lot less dramatic than most people would think.
People’s idea of what a dead social media site looks like is very different from what they actually look like.
People think “immediate implosion and disappearing from the face of the internet”, but social media sites die long before the last post is posted.
Forums with dozens of users used to die over months. Big social sites take years, and they die not by going dark or quiet, but by becoming generic and boring or filled with Nazis. Either way, they shift from being “sticky” to being easily skipped over.
* MySpace has entered the chat*
Which it can do because it still exists. And shit, it was taken over at one point by Nazi enabler Rupert Murdoch.