The problem is that such an open-ended prediction has absolutely no value whatsoever...

I'm sure Reddit will die someday, but people have been saying this for at least 10 years or more. When non-technical users started using it, when violentacrez et al were banned, with every layout change big or small, staff changes...

People said the same thing about Facebook when it opened to non-edu users or when it launched the timeline. Or when Apple is antagonistic towards developers.

Reddit, Facebook, Apple and other companies are able to do well by antagonizing niche users because niche users can be replaced by regular folk. And sometimes it's almost necessary to antagonize those early users, since they can be a barrier to growth.

Reddit wants to dissociate themselves from 4chan, t_d, Boston Bomber and all this stuff. And they're doing it via cat pictures and the sort.

The value is in knowing they always have to watch their toes because it can all be over in a heartbeat. There is a very fine line between domination and irrelevance.

Digg, MySpace and Friendster weren't "over in a heartbeat". It took decay and lack of care with the platform, plus strong competition with strong venture capital funding. Plus, they were never as dominant or as entrenched as Reddit is.

Reddit is not going away just because you dislike it.

I was never on MySpace and Friendster but Digg was over in a heartbeat with the introduction of their redesign.

And I don’t care about Reddit one way or the other, it kind of stinks but it’ll ultimately be replaced by something else that also stinks.

As I remember it, what happened on Digg was that there was a kind of friendly rivalry between Reddit and Digg. So everybody on Digg was already aware of Reddit. Then when the redesign hit, a meme spread that "This redesign sucks, try reddit". And so people did. And what they found was a much better community (Digg was more like a news website with a comment section).

The cautionary tail for Reddit is that what keeps people locked into a social network is community. And if they replace community with cat pictures, the whole thing will fall apart.

Yep. Also, what Digg did wasn't just a redesign, but also a complete rewrite from scratch in the exact way Joel Spolsky told everyone not to do one decade before [1]. It was buggy and missing important community features, and it was incompatible with the old website because they had changed the whole database too, so there was no way of choosing between old and new running side by side like you can with Reddit.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Those networks had all strong alternatives.

I see none for reddit atm.