The last major holdouts in the protest against Reddit’s API pricing relented, abandoning the so-called “John Oliver rules” which only allowed posts featuring the TV host. It's the official end of the battle. The Reddit protest is over, and Reddit won.
Slashdot is actually a fairly active community that was never aspiring to be the “front page of the internet”. As far as I can tell, it’s about as popular as it ever was. And Fark isn’t much different…slighlty less users than in the past, but they have some active content creators.
The comparison you’re looking for is Digg. That was the previous “front page of the internet” before they committed suicide and handed the title to Reddit. Now they are a news aggregate site where almost all content is created by bots. This is the path Reddit is travelling down. Completely curated, AI generated, with bots commenting to create the illusion of engagement. It’s almost there now. The amount of reposted content and copied comments has increased substantially over the last few years. And with the availability of LLMs now, it will only get worse.
Wait until the IPO, if it ever happens. The site will transform into a news aggregator ran by bots. No one will care about it anymore once Spez cashes out, or if he can’t then the entire thing will implode dramatically. Just like Digg.
Lol - shows you how old I am. There was a point, pre-Digg and pre-Reddit, where Slashdot was the premiere news aggregation site (circa 2000 - 2004) followed closely by Fark.com as the premiere shitposting site… mainly because they were the first to use the post/commentary style that made Reddit and Digg so popular. Slashdot didn’t aspire to this point of prominence - they simply assumed it because there was nothing else out there at the time that was as good.
You’re correct that when Reddit and Digg came on the scene, they pretty much erased the concept of Slashdot or Fark being the “frontpage of the internet”. Neither site died, as you note, and Slashdot in particular continued to maintain an active community that persists to this day by keeping their content tech-focused and not fucking with the user experience that made them popular in the first place.
I chose Fark and Slashdot as examples because I think unlike Digg (which just completely collapsed), I do see Reddit communities persisting in a similar reduced form.