I’m sure it’s not going to last forever as this site grows in popularity
To me that's one of the main benefits of having so many instances; even if the traffic gets wild on a couple there will still be smaller instances with different sorts of users.
This post earlier in the day I think had some good information on this subject.
There is a lot of syncing going on across instances so part of it could be due to some comments just not being federated yet or it could be that the one with less is not federating with as many other instances and missing some users that federate to the other.
I'd be curious if "Squirrel" originated with the SQuirreL client. The only time I've heard someone call SQL "squirrel" was because they were using SQL interchangeably with the client.
Presumably those wouldn't be as upvoted so they wouldn't sort with useful content but I do think someone might go on forever posting like that with a 0 score where a -1 might give them a moment of reflection.
Users who are looking for larger communities can just dogpile whatever is popular and users who aren't will find something that fits them better just as they always have. I think some people do struggle with not having the massive fire hose they are used to though but everything starts somewhere; it never was going to be everything to everyone all at once. I'm personally finding not being lost in a sea of noise to be more engaging.
It was never going to do more than get people talking, the number of subreddits isn't as important as what the long term impact to users and quality will be. They have signaled their interests are not user centric, it wont be the last outrage I'm sure but they'll keep getting away with it if there isn't a clear alternative and people keep going back.
It also lines up with the media attention span. On day 5 "reddit lost users during the blackout" will be a better headline than "blackout still going on fyi".
I think of AI in programming the same way I think about search engines (there are a lot of parallels). It can be helpful when you're stuck or learning something new, it can be wrong, and if you use it for everything you might get something that works but its not going to look like something someone with experience would have done.
Very reasonable and I think sums up my feelings on it as well.
I avoid meta like the plague but making some kind of pre-emptive pact to block it in an open ecosystem seems a lot like a gatekeeping bandwagon; they don't even bother to list an actual reason.