> People who use third party apps are outliers. They do not make Reddit any money
I'd wager that > 90% of moderators use third party apps, and they indirectly do make Reddit a lot of money. Without the moderators the entire site goes to shit.
Yes, however once they demod everyone, they will find other mods willing to do the work. There are a lot of people on reddit, something like 500 million monthly active users, at least some of them would be able to mod subreddits.
People end up leaving or not participating subreddits with low-quality moderation. They also tend to get overrun with spam and abuse, and have to be shut down. Finding a bunch of crappy replacement moderators isn't going to work long-term.
A small number of mods moderate the overwhelming amount of subreddits and posts on the platform (some moderate hundreds of subs), and those are doing just fine. At least for the most popular subreddits, nothing will materially change.
What part is contradictory? Those moderators will be replaced by a similar number, ie less than 10, that can moderate the top 100 or so subs. My comment was on the scale of moderation required, at least for subs on /r/all which is what the vast majority of users use, not whether those exact moderators will still stick around. And you never know, mods might say they're going to quit but many mods might still stay. I don't expect to see power mods like GallowBoob going anywhere.
The other part of my prediction is that some of the (real, non-bot) engagement that the giant generic subreddits get are from users that are anchored to Reddit by more specialized subreddits, like those for specific games, hobbies, that sort of thing. If those special interest subreddits die out, I think the large generic subreddits will become more hollowed out than they are already, and not worth much.
Exactly. It's not about the absolute percentage of people using third-party services, it's about the users that matter: power users, moderators, and especially content posters/creators.
I'd wager that > 90% of moderators use third party apps, and they indirectly do make Reddit a lot of money. Without the moderators the entire site goes to shit.
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