Anyways, I see zero evidence that Reddit will come back from this conflagration in any sort of good shape, and I see even less evidence that the VC business model is going to do any better with anything else.

Selective low effort is what those professors exhibit. But their ideas are valuable and worth publicizing.

Twitter is an example of many low-effort scientists writing some good content.

Twitter is also the current textbook example of the problem with low-effort platforms that are controlled by capital. Like, do I even need to explain this to anyone? Are there still any Musk fanboys in the room who think he's playing 4d chess?

But while Twitter circles the drain and the world scrambles to figure out what to use instead, and Mastodon steps up as a competitor which cannot be seized and ruined by capital, ever, Reddit stands firm as the one true platform that got it right! Everyone gazes in awe at the one last hope for the capitalist internet, which seems to be doing just fine.

And Reddit looked over at Twitter, and then Reddit looked down like Rorschach, and said... "Hold my Over 8000 beers..."

Also, reddit’s value is exactly that you have very different demographics on each subreddit, and “hearing the voice” of people is the whole point.

The fediverse is in its early days. Nobody would argue that Reddit.com was "easy to use" in 2007.

As a matter of fact, there's already a Lemmy/Fediverse UX that works just the same as an old-school forum/BB; the whole federation facet is exposed as an extra feature on top of that: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB We know that UX works, because it was quite popular even among novice users.