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Reddit is a Dying Mall
(www.staygrounded.online)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Malls are still around in some places too, but nothing in there is worth going to. Maybe Mall of America if you want to chance getting stabbed or shot, other than that they're either glorified office space or entirely abandoned. But, like reddit, they're still technically there.
Exactly. From the article:
My city has malls. They are just big buildings for housing an aunties anne's pretzels, a filthy play area for kids, and any other sucker who is still renting a retail space.
My local mall has churches that rent out the retail space. It's a weird stort of community center.
That's just a horrible analogy. Yes malls are basically dead but still technically there. Reddit is just as popular and active as it has ever been. Sure some people, like us, left. The vast majority stayed.
The 'mass exodus' never happened. The entirety of lemmy put together is the size of a small niche sub barely anyone actually knows about.
Yeah it is not a good analogy because when it came to malls something more convenient and easier for everyone to use became a better option with the rise in internet shopping. It's not like malls made people angry and people left it for something that wasn't as convenient to use.
People who moved to the fediverse aren't representative of the average user who just wants a community in a niche area of interest to use, and never cared that strongly enough to abandon it. Most do not want to go through the growing pains of trying to grow a new community on a new platform and less content.
The mall pictured in the article, Rolling Acres Mall in Akron OH, was the largest of three indoor shopping malls in the greater Akron area. I don't know if you've ever been to Akron, but we didn't need three goddamn indoor shopping malls. We're down to just one now, which seems appropriate.