This may not be a bold prediction, but I imagine that more and more fake users will continue to exist on reddit. No action will be taken to remove bots that are used by governments, marketers, researchers, and soon script kiddies. Reddit employees will know that this is a massive problem, but the business will not want to do anything to stop user growth and jeopardize the value of their platform and its size. Most real people won't know how frequently they are talking to bots, and conversations will be drawn down into the gutter. Within 5 years, 50% of all posts and users will be bots.
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That's an incredibly documented expose. Do you maintain a database of sources about this or was this all collected and written specifically for posting here?
Well said. Good content contributes a lot.
You're right too that niche communities are less inviting targets. This isn't really surprising since the 90s vision of the internet was always a decentralized place where people run their own site/blog without large, centralized platforms. We know how this largely turned out with a few sites/companies dominating the internet. There are engineering and economic reasons why centralized systems will always be more efficient, but those who seek freedom and privacy will prefer the decentralized systems.
I don't know what the solution to this is for communities like phuks if a larger community develops. Besides the engineering and economic forces that push for centralization, there might also be an element of selection bias in these communities too whereby mainstream sites attrack more casual users.