Eh I wouldn’t call it sad. Reddit is literally just a forum hosting site. The fact you and I are posting here is proof that there are many other avenues for random people to communicate ideas to each other.
Yes, but all of that knowledge available in one place, all extremely easy to navigate through conventional search engines or pushshift-based ones… it’s going to take a lot to rebuild that here (and maybe even more for search engines to understand how to properly index fediverse pages). All because a greedy ass started idolizing the most self-centered person alive.
Obsolete and redundant? Google themselves said their search results were heavily impacted from the blackout. It fulfills a niche no other social media has (well, except the fediverse or Reddit clones but I doubt they were afraid of them) and it was working perfectly for the common user. Only issue is it wasn’t ready for IPO, and spez really wanted to go public.