Indeed. All things come to an end, and it's often a slow painful end. I think reddit is reaching that point. Will it close down in a year or two? Maybe not. It will likely linger on for many more years. But it won't be the same, and the quality and traffic will go down until it's a shadow of it's former self.

The interesting thing with social media platforms is that the way they declined is still not predictable. Aside from the fact that they are (in there grand scheme of things) still pretty new, there are several variations of them. And their evolution can be improved by many factors.

I think we all know about the 'facebookification' of sites that your your user profile to your real life identity and then let you find real life contacts and post casual opinions. They draw in the younger generation, who are active and contribute a lot (not necessarily good content, but content nonetheless). Then older generations get pulled in via them, tensions and credibility concerns arise, content quality goes down, and the younger generation move on to the next platform. That just leaves a more passive user base that posted less engaging content and less often.

But more anonymous (liked reddit) platforms seem to fade a bit differently. Maybe in a more straightforward way. The same general principle applies, I guess: content withers away and then users drift away. So the platform just gets replaced when the next thing shows up. This happened with reddit replacing slashdot.

I get a strong feeling reddit is about to get replaced. Not sure by what yet (Fediverse or Threads or something else), but I can't see reddit reversing course not that they've pissed off a critical mass of them people who kept their platform running smoothly.

Maybe their leadership is in a mad scramble to get that IPO done ASAP because they all saw the writing on the wall, and have for a little while now. And they want to cash out while they can. They know social media platforms have an expiration date, and even before the API and mod fiasco, they knew they were approaching it.