Makes no difference one way or the other. Reddit will slowly die over the coming months and years, much like previous social media sites have done. It's over as soon as they want to IPO. There are good, valid reasons to sometimes go against the immediate,higher-profit choice. And sometimes that reason is not alienating your user base by insulting their shared culture. Because doing something like that will get you higher profits now, but will represent diminishing returns later.
It's over for reddit, they just don't know it yet.
It's over for reddit, they just don't know it yet.
It's less that they don't know, and more that they don't care. IPOs are about unloading your bags onto someone else.
They've consciously decided that the value of the content they've already captured is worth more than the value that future content will bring them. Now they just have to get out from under the pyramid before it collapses.
I think a lot of people are thinking that social media dies when nobody uses it. I think those people also don't realize that Digg still exists.
Reddit will slowly slump into the endless morass of meaningless social media that's largely irrelevant, having lost anything that ever made it actually special.