They wasted half a decade not building promised moderation tools for the people who create value on Reddit.

Instead they were busy running cost/benefit analyses on how aggressive the dark patterns to drive users to the maligned mobile app should be.

> It’s their space. Changing anything is like someone’s snuck into their house at night and remodelled their lounge.

This reminds me a discussion with a landscaper. He was wary of landscapers who wanted to go against the flow and who view themselves as painter artists. He explained the fundamental difference between his work and the work of a painter as follows : "a painter makes a work of art for people to see, and a landscaper makes a work of art for people to live in". It's not the same to see disruptive art from time to time, and to live in a city with a disruptive landscape.

A stable environment can also allow people to build other art on top of it. Such as painter artists inspired by a sustainable landscape to create disruptive paintings.

> It’ll be interesting to see whether this is Reddit’s Digg moment or it’s more like the Facebook newsfeed where everyone kicked up a fuss for a bit and then carried on as before.

In order for this to be Reddit's "Digg moment", there needs to be a viable candidate to switch to.

There isn't, as far as I can tell.

The theory seems correct. Social media like stock markets is a collection of lots streams of random user behavior. It's difficult to pin down what users value except the fact that controversial stuff, scam artists etc are always a hit followed by a long long tail of small niches.

Yes and: One of the hosts of Accidental Tech Podcast, who has also worked in social media, had a long deep dive into why casual efforts would ultimately fail, once the trogs invaded, for entirely non-product reasons. Moderation, DDoS, lawyers, etc. IIRC, they were explaining why they'd never host a mastdon instance themselves. Or maybe it was a viral app of the week with two young founders, who accidentally caught the tiger by the tail. Or both.

As a moderate, new > old Twitter. A lot of progressives left because they're not favored and lost their echo chamber.