I wonder if a few years from now everyone will remember reddit like digg and ebaumsworld. It’s certainly not unprecedented for the big guy in this exact category to fall so I’m not sure why spez has such confidence.
I highly doubt Reddit will digg-ify itself to the point of a complete shutdown. The mechanics of the Internet have changed. When Digg sank itself into irrelevancy most of those sites were still populated by vocal, semi tech-literate users, on desktops, using it in their free time recreationally, and the user bases were significantly smaller. Digg v4 nuked that entire user base and they couldn’t recover
Reddit now is quite large, and a vast majority of its user base are mobile app users who don’t really care much about the site other than scrolling for content. The average Internet user is much more apathetic (and frankly, dumb) than they were back in “the day”. So yes. Content will get shittier, it’ll get more and more astroturfed, and the highly specialized discussions will fade away- but unless something really drastic happens, it will just be a slow fizzle into grey mediocrity that’s “just another site” without any fond memories of a grand collapse.
The problem is that Reddit relies on highly motivated and tech literate volunteers to keep subreddits from degenerating almost immediately into pure horseshit. Without some critical mass of capable moderators, I think the whole thing could implode, and these are exactly the people who are most angry. Will the average wall scroller keep posting pictures of their plants or knitting? Probably for a while. But will they keep doing it when their favorite subs are full of shitty memes if not porn? I guess we’ll see.