That’s a recent quote from Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler. Here’s more of it: This week, Reddit has been telling protesting moderators that if they keep their communities private, the company will take action against them. Any actions could happen as soon as this afternoon.
Reddit is dead after this
Sadly, I don’t think so. I think they looked at the number of new users and the number of users using 3rd party apps and decided they can lose those.
Edit: apparently Reddit has between 500 million and 1.6 billion active users monthly. According to RiF developers, RiF and Apollo have a combined 3 million active users. If all of those 3rd party app users decide to never go back, Reddit might lose between 0.6% and 0.2% of their userbase. I think they’ll be fine…
That’s until you factor in that the majority of that 0.6% and 0.2% were the people running their site for free, disabled people, or both.
I don’t think the issue is that users will abandon, but that the site was only as usable as it was because of the mod tools that allowed the people who worked for free to moderate.
Now spam, hate, and all other such garbage will be a lot more common. One subreddit I subscribed to only had a single active mod and the only reason the sub was functional was the mod tools that now no longer work.
It may take some time, but people will leave when the subreddits are flooded with hate and spam.