The thing to watch for is if the admins take control of any major subreddits. That’s what killed FreeNode.
I wonder how these old websites that seemingly no one uses still churn out money?
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
I found one thread with 9 comments. In the popular section. And it devolved into someone calling another an 'asshole'.
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 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.
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.
E.g. fandom is doing as good as ever despite many leaving in protest events.
Time will tell which this is.
Even if that wasn't the primary blocker, most alternatives exist to host primarily politically partisan communities.