It's a dangerous game they're playing. They don't create original content, so if someone clones or creates a site with the old user-friendly interface then the switch might flip on them as abruptly as it did for digg.
I hope so, I’ve come to seriously hate Reddit. I never used Facebook or Twitter as a replacement for the forums of the 2000s internet so it didn’t bother me as much that they were gamified and had low quality content. Reddit pivoting to a social media site breaks my heart and the fact that people who work there come to HN and say, “we don’t care what you or power users think because we have record engagement,” just infuriates me.
Reddit killed the old Internet forums but was a good replacement for them to an extent, and now they’ve destroyed and stopped trying to be that replacement leaving the internet with a serious lack of niche communities for discussion. I’ve tried putting together ideas for something that could fill that niche and not be susceptible to becoming overran with low quality meme content but I don’t really have the time to work on such a thing with the attention it deserves right now; and it isn’t a trivial problem to solve.
