More important is originality…
Lots of people/bots would just take an existing post from Reddit, and repost it. Sometimes to a different sub, sometimes to the same sub.
For most users, it was still “new” because they hadn’t seen it before.
Those accounts are still reposting. There’s more than few that do it here too.
But that OC has been drastically cut down, there’s just a delay in users noticing that there’s fewer and fewer “new” reposts going around.
So reddit doesn’t see a huge decrease in users immediately, but time on site and daily users will continue to decrease
More important is originality…
Is it, though? I left Reddit for here, so don’t take this as being in their defense, but if originality and ad revenue were meaningfully correlated, Facebook and Instagram would be bastions of original content.
Hell, some of the most profitable YouTubers only post reaction content.
You’d have a point on any other platform. See, the unique thing about Reddit was that you could go there for OC. It’s basic business that you carve out a niche and you play that niche away from the competition. Reddit may not be doomed to fail but it is doomed to stagnate because it is competing closer with Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and news sites without decent ways to monetize and grow.
Investors like to see a unique market. Why is the platform retaining users? Moderation is on a downhill slide and these huge communities hardly feel organic.
Reddit is becoming Facebook + porn and the porn makes them no money. It’s actively unattractive to investors.
What sucks for them is that the users themselves cause this. OC is hard to make. Harder to highlight and celebrate. Reposts and news about politics and porn are 90% of the site. They get upvotes constantly. There’s an audience for that, but it has far less growth potential.
I would love to agree with you, and OC is certainly important to us, but the majority of the most upvoted content on Reddit hasn’t been OC for quite a few years now. I would guess Reddits serves most of its ads to people doom-scrolling the front page, and it probably likes it that way.
