They are growing every year.
https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1309791/reddit-mau-worldw...
https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1309791/reddit-mau-worldw...
i agree the new version is very busy and buggy on mobile web
Last time I asked someone this question they mentioned some power user stuff that didn't really apply to regular Reddit content consumers / casual posters.
You can run an ad on a subway and get more users. That doesn't mean you're doing a good job. The only reason those users have something to see is because of community health.
It's always been that way.
Come to think of it that might be a reason why their ban happy, more people you ban who come back looks like a new user signup.
User error.
It's really not hard to not get banned. Site-wide, at least.
I'm pretty active and my account is nearly 13 years old.
https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/105039166355267174...
Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views
Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?
Con: LOL no...no not those views
Me: So....deregulation?
Con: Haha no not those views either
Me: Which views, exactly?
Con: Oh, you know the ones
- suggesting that COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak due to not following safety protocols
- Questioning if the full shutdown of schools for a disease which had a relatively low mortality rate in children was the best decisio and if we fully had considered the impacts.
- suggesting that predators could abuse gender self identification laws to gain access to new victims.
- and one satirical posts advocating "let us grill it all in a beautiful nuclear inferno."
It seems though you are suggesting there are only a narrowly defined opinions that are acceptable to hold and that deviations outside of those are so heretical that should not be allowed to exist.
Only admins can ban you site-wide or shadowban you, and I can't imagine expressing any of those opinions being worthy of a site-wide ban from an admin unless you expressed them in an offensive way. ie, for the first opinion, using a slur when referring to the Chinese lab workers, or basically in any way accusing them of poor standards because they're Chinese. Likewise, for the third opinion, I've too often seen transphobia get disguised as concern trolling.
If it's moderators banning you from specific subs...well...that's just shitty moderators. Some of them are extremely power-hungry and ban happy, but they're not employees of reddit, and their actions should not be reflected on reddit as a whole.
I've seen no evidence that anything they've introduced in the last 10 years has contributed to any of that growth, and my evidence is that just about every feature announced or implemented since then is now either gone or largely ignored by the userbase.
They considered this around the 3rd party app fiasco and it was clear old Reddit has a few years left because mods allhate the new Reddit UI
It's very hard to kill a two-sided market when it gets established. Look at Craigslist or Twitter.
An interesting thing about Reddit to me is many people who look at it see strongly offputting things like being overrun by image memes but when you look at it closely there is so much there about so many subjects. From time to time you find those brilliant social media posts that remind me of some of the emails from the Enron Emails data set where people talk about what they did for training in the army. Perhaps that is what keeps people coming back or maybe they are all about the memes.
The fact that people often append "reddit" to their Google queries is a testament to this. Even if they aren't active participants in these niche communities, they know that they are the easiest place to find reasonably reliable information from other humans on them.
If these types of communities stop flourishing on Reddit for any reason, then the site will become much easier to replace by any other generic meme factory.
I guess they grew in other countries.