> The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits from—are, as far as I can tell, more likely to get a lot angrier about abusive corporate nonsense, simply because they're more invested.
I suspect strongly that these people have been purged already over the past 2-3 years. You simply don't hear much about it, because de-platforming them muzzles most of them, and if anyone does complain elsewhere it's easy to smear them as Nazis or whatnot. I mean, they can't effectively defend themselves against that sort of lie when reddit has scrubbed their comment history from anyone else's view.
OP didn't claim that. You're giving a very uncharitable reading of the argument.
Fact is, the best people on Reddit have been leaving for many years. There have been many purges, of many scales. The fact you didn't hear about them helps demonstrate OPs point (their actual point, not the one you put in their mouth).
And those purges are just one thread in a long tapestry of disrespect towards moderators and users of the site. Spez in particular has been caught lying, editing people's comments, making false accusations, etc on many occasions.
They claimed that "The people who do the real contributing—posting, modding, defining the culture and building the communities that Reddit benefits" were driven off ("these people have been purged already over the past 2-3 years.")
Small groups and individuals can be extremely important. It's less about the raw numbers of 'how many <X> did we gain/lose' and more about 'what kind of tone are we setting'.
When Reddit allowed /r/the_donald to flourish, what sort of message did that send? When there was a purge in/of leftist communities, what sort of message did that send? Politically, what Reddit allows is actually quite narrow, and it's trending toward mainstream sanitized neoliberal center-right (aka 'advertiser-friendly').
When Reddit started to corral everyone into one shitty app by breaking the mobile web experience, what message did that send? And now, what message is being sent with this API cash-grab?
Reddit's positioning is constantly chafing against Reddit's core demographic. The people who operate Reddit don't understand what they want (aside from $$$), don't understand their customers/content providers, and now seem unwilling to even listen to their customers/content providers.
Many messages stacked up over the years eventually form a story. What's the story of Reddit?
Those people aren't common on the default subreddits, which might make it feel like there is not much community. But in the places that count, the more niche communities that actually have real community, those people are still around.
Besides, its a question of scale. There are loads of people like myself who make effort-post/comments sporadically on a few different platforms. There is enough such people that there can be (and is!) several viable twitter-like platforms at the moment. There's no reason the same can't be true for reddit.
I commented about a month back how the /r/programming seemed dead in the last two years compared to Hacker News. It’s not even close to what it used to be, and I suspect the new design and other bad choices contributed to that. It’s like the really good programmers who made interesting comments I learned from left. But of course I was downvoted and someone said HN users are “probably inept nerds like me”.
I suspect strongly that these people have been purged already over the past 2-3 years. You simply don't hear much about it, because de-platforming them muzzles most of them, and if anyone does complain elsewhere it's easy to smear them as Nazis or whatnot. I mean, they can't effectively defend themselves against that sort of lie when reddit has scrubbed their comment history from anyone else's view.