Absolutely. The quality drop on discussions was wild. I used to spend hours a week discussing on reddit. Now despite still using it to keep up to date on various topics, I rarely comment.

The post quality dropped quite a bit as well at that time. But that has always been a steady “eternal September” type of decline so it’s harder to isolate the cause.

Reddit will become less and less useful to the AI giants for training if it doesn’t contain new and ongoing deep communication like it once did.

Were they? They took one of the most recognizable brands of the century and made something people tend to avoid referring to because it’s hard to.

They were initially based on research into prediction markets. However that research, while interesting, certainly wasn’t able to …predict… what would happen when highly funded commercial enterprises with massive marketing budgets started pushing them right in the middle of an already growing gambling epidemic.

So, yes, they are now fully gambling apps with little predictive value.

One of the great ironies of these apps is that people are actively demanding they act more like gambling and less like prediction markets. For example, prediction markets require insiders to participate to function effectively. But the people using these apps, and people who hate these apps alike want to ban insiders from using them to keep them “fair”. This pushes the apps even further from prediction and toward gambling.

It’s not an oppressive society for Sergey when Sergey is an oppressor. Forcing him to be slightly less of an oppressor? That would be real oppression.

They seem like niche publications, probably had dedicated readership. Pretty sad to see smaller publications falling like this. Valnet all over again, maybe worse somehow.