this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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Here is the thing, I don't think they are driving towards a cliff. In olden times, reddit was one of several options for doomscrolling, with Slashdot, Digg, et Al. When Digg shot themselves in the foot, Reddit was ready to take up the slack, so eternal September happened, and Digg essentially withered away.
At that time the combined user base of these sites was probably an order of magnitude less of present day reddit.
I believe that reddit has achieved critical mass, and they can pretty much do any shit they want. They may lose users, but they'll be a drop in the bucket.
The inertia is too large.
Myspace, Digg and Slashbot thought that too. Look at FB basically a bot farm like reddit. Something new will come along, maybe its Lemmy, it was Voat for a second. Discord, IG, TikTac have all be chipping away at them.
They all will fall down if they over reach.
Not being combative, its just how this goes imo.
Yeah, they can shoot themselves in the foot, and alternatives exist/will appear, but if you have whatever millions of users, and you lose 25%, Reddit will still be a 500 lb gorilla.
Also, we have to remember that the vast majority of users are like your typical FB users; mindless and couldn't care less about these changes.
Reddit predates doomscrolling. It wasn't even originally algorithmic if I recall, just entirely user driven.
Digg, reddit, Slashdot and others were and are doomscrolling in nature.
Also, while the main input was upvotes, your home was a combination of weights between front page and your subscriptions. Maybe crude by today's standards, but algorithms.
It absolutely wasn't doomscrolling thirteen years ago. Upvotes took things to the front page if you fucked with that. Otherwise it was just another forum, except it had sub forums for literally everything. One forum to rule them all. It wasn't even legitimately a "social media" till after they released the official app and "new reddit." Were you even out of school back when reddit was coming up? It wasn't an infinite scroll and was intended to be checked once a day. You'd check reddit after your emails while drinking your coffee. Like, it absolutely wasn't doomscrolling. Doomscrolling wasn't a thing. It was just a forum for any/every thing and people largely hung out in whatever corners they settled into. Like every post used to be filled with professionals or experts on the subject and there was considerable valuable discussion. Old reddit was very much a remnant of the old internet.
Out of school? Kind of. I wrote my first programs on a PDP 11 on a TTY. An actual perforated paper, daisy wheel TTY. No CRT. I was an admin of a Wang VS100 in the late 80's. Later I was a systems Manager at a small campus, and admin'd one of the servers myself, in the gopher/usenet era. My first browser was mosaic (Or was it Lynx? can't remember), and I coded my first website in HTML, no version number, HTML. Last time I bothered to look, my reddit account was 17 years old, and that was my second acount, I lost the password to my first, older account. So yeah, I was out of school. I do look younger than I am.
Well I certainly feel older after reading all that garbage. Feel better about yourself now? Might wanna get your memory checked then since you've clearly forgotten that reddit predates doomscrolling. It's absolutely that now, but for nearly a decade it was just a user driven content aggregator forum. Doomscrolling wasn't a thing. Infinite feeds weren't a thing. Prior to Cambridge analytica rage engagement feed algorithms weren't commonplace. I'm not sure why you're insisting it was always doomscrolling, all of that kicked up from basically nothing into high gear during Trump's first term.
There, there...
More standard lemming discourse. Makes reddit look palatable often enough. Well, at least your bullshit isn't gpt slop like half the comments here.