It seems like the community business itself is dying. Not just Reddit, but other communities and forums are all in decline. I thought it was because of LLMs, but they were already dying before LLMs appeared. Though LLMs did accelerate the decline.

The business model where a company owns a public community and monetizes through ads and search traffic seems to have just been a failed model.

The value of a community comes from the conversations and knowledge that users accumulate for free. But when the content company lowers accessibility under the pretense of protecting that content, new members stop coming in.

Platforms try to protect their assets, but in doing so, they end up damaging the ecosystem that created those assets in the first place.

Cloudflare recently reported that the majority of internet traffic is bots now. It wouldn't surprise me if the vast majority of traffic and comments on Reddit is now bots. Those organic conversations you're having? Bots. Those arguments with annoying people? Bots. All those positive comments and stories about the latest product/movie/politician/party/company/country? Bots. The entire front page is most likely owned and controlled and paid for by the highest bidders.

I think people are becoming more cynical about "social" media. It's far less social now and mostly anti-social. Maybe the new term should be rage-media or consumption-media. Either way I don't need more outrage in my life. I say good riddance to social media.

Good. The community business needs to die, and we need to return to actual communities. Since those are dead due to the previous transition to community businesses, it may take some time to recover.