Sometimes it happens, but often it doesn't.

E.g. fandom is doing as good as ever despite many leaving in protest events.

Time will tell which this is.

"good as ever" means what for fandom. I've never heard of it.

A.k.a. Wikia.

try to google any TV show or video game, it's the completely worthless spam blog that pollutes most of the results

God, it's so frustrating to accidentally click on a Fandom link when there are other, older, superior wikis around like UESP or Halopedia

Or, you know, Digg. Digg's demise was literally the birth of Reddit's popularity, but the lesson was seemingly lost on Reddit "leadership".

Yet Digg.com for whatever reason still exists.

I wonder how these old websites that seemingly no one uses still churn out money?

The google trends graph is the worst I've ever seen

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=digg&hl=...

EDIT: Note that it's a common slang word in Norwegian, hence why it still appears as a search term there

Did you try going there? Inexplicably it's worse than I could have imagined.

I found one thread with 9 comments. In the popular section. And it devolved into someone calling another an 'asshole'.

OK, well, maybe those were some really bland houses

Sell to someone who specializes in making money off of core audiences, cut costs, focus on revenue generators like micro transactions.

There's no equivalent to migrate to.

There most likely won't be. Reddit is Usenet 2.0. With Usenet, it was a diaspora. Sure, we had some sites like Slashdot that started in 1997 but even that was still targeting link aggregation focused discussions on tech related topics and there might only be a handful a day at times. The exodus from Usenet was to internet forums.

The exodus from Reddit seems to be to disperse among a combination of other forums, some Reddit-like sites like Tildes and Lemmy, and Discord.

Once we go through that for a while, we'll maybe have another consolidation again once a new round of companies give it a go. At least that's my hypothesis.

I think this conflict has been long brewing and has little to do with Apollo, and more to do with powermods running many subreddits not liking that the bots they use will get charged for API usage.

I think powermods don't want to draw the slightest attention to themselves (because users and press would start looking at them a bit too closely) or how/why they use bots.

The overwhelming majority of popular or even "popular niche" subreddits are moderated by a small handful of people, some of whom have moderation powers in hundreds of subreddits. A lot of mods have gone to the trouble of trying to hide it by using alts, but a lot of them just don't care / are proud of how many subs they mod. I'd be shocked if a number of them aren't getting paid or otherwise compensated by groups like PR firms.

Speaking of which, you know who else doesn't want to pay for API calls? Said PR firms, who are known to scan reddit posts for mention of client names so they can do damage control and manipulation.

These people run their subreddits like fiefdoms and they'll do petty nonsense like shadowban you from every subreddit they moderate because you accidentally piss them off in one.

At one point it was common to post in any of a number of subreddits powermods didn't like and discover you'd been preemptively shadowbanned because their bot was scanning for posts in those subreddits.

Why are you being downvoted? I wasn't aware this was happening. Thanks for the context.

There is no alternative, so I'm not sure where people would move to.

Unfortunately I think that's unlikely to happen, this is largely anecdotal but while a lot of the redditors have been using the platform for years on 3rd party apps, I've seen a lot more casual friends who only use Facebook or Instagram gradually move on to Reddit using their own app.

These people likely make up a large enough number that Reddit no longer feels the need to cater to their original audience. Maybe it's just me, but Reddits been feeling a lot more like Facebook for the past couple of years.

Most existing alternatives can't handle the 10000x user growth. They'll be down for enough weeks that reddit will be able to wait out the exodus's momentum if they tried.

Even if that wasn't the primary blocker, most alternatives exist to host primarily politically partisan communities.