Third scenario: People keep using it in anger until something better shows up, and by that time there will be enough unhappy people to spark a growing community in the New Place.
Nearly every attempt at a reddit alternative over the years has been flooded by those types of people. Even if you ignore the fact that advertisers will avoid that community like a plague, the average person will want to avoid it too.
Yes, most of the time because they have advertised themselves as a "free-speech place". Of course the people these places attract are the "5G is a Jewish conspiracy to vaccinate everybody" kinda people
"Huffman said one other strategy proved crucial to Reddit’s early success, which most people are unaware of: The team submitted a ridiculous amount of content under fake user accounts to give the appearance of popularity."
...
“The first thing it did was it set the tone,” by the activity it displayed to visitors, Huffman said. “We were submitting content that we would have been interested in seeing. That meant the content on Reddit … was good. And when you show up , you know exactly what the site is about.”
https://venturebeat.com/2012/06/22/reddit-fake-users/
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-t...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...