I've seen no evidence niche subreddits in general are dying because Reddit's growth in general is so strong and a rising tide lifts all boats. I've seen niche subreddits climb in traffic steadily even as their overall ranking on reddit declines.

I just would have guessed new reddit would have started the decline years ago but the apex hasn't even been reached yet. Still I do think the apex is coming just because of the sheer user hostility of Reddit.

Same here. Reddit wouldn't be so bad if they literally didn't shut down every subreddit just because the psychotically loud minority said so. Plus it boggles my mind why they would do that. You are actively telling your users to go elsewhere. That's literally money and engagement walking out the door. And a lot of it. Now it's just memes, "The republicans are evil again...!", and "My mother who sold me to an african prince now wants a portion of the money he has, AITA?" The whole karma concept is garbage. The purpose for that was curating content and moderation. Not a "agree/disagree" button. Obviously it gets abused but slashdot and HN do it way better. Nobody can see your vote counts on HN and slashdot allows for more ways to mod something so that we can know it's not just the downvote train saying the comment is dumb but because of various other reason.

Can you point out some subreddits they've shut down that are "money and engagement walking out the door"? The only subreddits I've heard of being shut down are as objectively racist and derogatory as you can get (or NSFL gore). Advertisers and mainstream users generally don't want to be associated with sites promoting those types of content.

You can't tell me if you placed advertising on Pornhub, your brand is not going to get recognized by men all over. I realize it's not what a lot of prudish corporations care for, but is it really going to affect Pepsi or mcdonalds if they just have an ad for one of their products next to that? Not a single person would think of less of them and only the media would criticize them.

The marketing for those brands is all about getting you to passively think of them as wholesome enjoyment. Even allowing for the dubious discounting of media influence, do you really think a porn <-> McDonalds association is something they want to have in a dad’s mind when considering where to take his family for lunch?

Eating at McDonald's and watching porn aren't that dissimilar: once I'm finished, I always want to leave as quickly as possible.

I don't know if it would affect Pepsi's or McDonald's sales, but it would likely affect somebody's career at their marketing agency (not in a good way).

Anything conservative.

The Donald was a hotbed of whackjobs, but it was also the biggest Trump forum online. They should be allowed to talk freely so the rest of us can laugh, rather than persuing the censorship route so advertisers don't leave.

It also was brigading people and doing a lot of things that were against reddit's policies. The subreddit moderators were stickying posts that supported white supremacy and were not actively policing users who threatened violence. At what point should they act against the community?

T_D was destroyed by their own mods. They knew exactly what the site policies were were and intentionally ignored them.

I mean, those people won't follow a policy of wearing masks to save their own grandparents. Any site policy infringes on "mUh FReEdOmS".

They chose to be banned so that they could cry censorship.

No, The Donald moved off of reddit and there were 0 posts for months. Reddit banned them anyway, clearly politically motivated.

> Reddit banned them anyway, clearly politically motivated.

It doesn't matter where "they" moved. What matters is what was published in that subreddit. They could just as easily have deleted the abhorrent racist posts and comments before they left. They didn't do that, so the subreddit continued to violate site policies.

Try this: create a subreddit, post child porn, and then never post again. What you'll find is that as soon as your post is reported/noticed, it will be deleted along with your account and your subreddit. It won't matter that you've moved on and now post your child porn elsewhere.

Racism and death threats have no place on Reddit as per the site policies that the mods agreed to so when the mods refused to comply, their sub was deleted. Nothing to do with politics.

> [...] HN do it way better

Downvote is also used as disagree a lot on HN, it's just that with the minimum karma requirement there are fewer users that can downvote than those that can upvote so it's slightly less visible.

> not popular enough to devolve into no-effort meme spam. Or possibly terrible moderation ruins the sub completely.

Pick one. Strong moderation keeps the small subs great, but the mods of those same small subs get hated for their heavy-handed moderation.

Nobody reads the rules.

New ones pop up to replace the ruined ones. I love Reddit and still find it very useful.