Asklemmy

This will end exactly the same way the Twitter -> Mastodon thing ended.

Reddit will continue. A slightly worse Reddit, with more bots, more low-effort content, and less quality OC.

Moderation will degrade slightly as the admins replace protesting moderators with more obedient ones, and/or communities lose interest and use the new "voting" (lol) systems to pick admins which will give them the reliable dopamine hits.

A small percentage of Redditors, especially the power users, will move on. A small percentage in Reddit terms is a tidal wave for any other platform. Some percentage of that number of Redditors leaving will come here.

Lemmy & Kbin will experience growing pains. Issues caused by scaling up infrastructure, instance to instance friction, etc. These will get resolved with time. When things settle, we will have a fraction of reddit's userbase, but neither will we need more. We'll have enough to have stable, engaging communities which will slowly grow.

In other words, a mirror reflection of the Mastodon story.

The louder they protest it's not doing anything, the more you can be certain that it is.

If there is no effect, then why is he losing his ever loving mind over it? Why are they going to potentially change rules that have stayed the same since Reddit's inception as a result?

I mean, if that's how they treat the mods, who would want to mod for reddit? It is unpaid work, the only reasons they are doing it would either be to feel empowered or to foster a community. What spez did is to tell mods they are powerless and to show them the community doesn't matter. Without good mods, people won't be sticking around.

Considering the volume of bots spreading venom about it, I have to say it's doing something

I certainly don't think Reddit is going to die out from this; its far too big. But I do think that Spez has managed to irrevocably change the culture of the site forever (particularly by forcing out the long time users). I personally have no intention of going back despite having been active on the site almost daily since 2010

I think one needs to see the bigger picture here. The protest that started earlier this week might not have left a big dent in reddit yet. What it did though is raise attention and increase awareness for alternative news/content aggregators like kbin. They're not anywhere close to competing with reddit yet but the door got opened.

The shortsighted reddit politics basically helped to kickstart their own future competitors. If we do our best here and bring in good content, comment and get past only consuming there will be a real chance to become more appealing than reddit in the long run. I'm definitely here to stay.

This incident won't be the last straw, but it will be the turning point of a slow and general decline.

They sure are trying really hard to put a stop to the blackout they say is having no effect.
It may be true that the disturbance has minimal effect on overall site traffic and advertising revenue, but it's caught the attention of the media which could have much larger effects.
But the blackout isn't really what's catching most of the attention anymore, it's the mishandling of the situation that's ending up in the news most of the time now. Spez is bringing most of this on himself.

I'd guess there's impact if they're forcing subs to reopen via threats and generally acting like tyrants with the self control of a toddler.

Zero impact on Reddit.

Reddit has 52 million daily active users and approximately 430 million users who use it once a month. In comparison, Lemmy has a mere 143k users and kbin has about 33k users. Reddit hasn't noticed that anyone left, and it never will.

Reddit will consolidate its platform and fully implement its ad business. 99.9% of users will stick around because they don't care that much about 3rd party apps. Reddit will then have a big revenue stream from ads, allowing it to achieve profitability and do an IPO, which will bring in another boatload of money. At that point Reddit has plenty of cash to invest in improving its in-house app, mod tools, spam filters, etc.

I think this is the wrong question to ask. The real question is if Lemmy is good enough for you to replace Reddit, and if not, how can we improve it. What happens to Reddit is irrelevant, and in my view it will continue spiraling towards being a hellhole of memes, ads and guerrilla marketing. Some people will stay there no matter what, and for me that's fine - I'm not sure if I have much to discuss with people like that in the first place.

I don't really care. I'm here now, deleted my 12 year old account in the process. People thinking Reddit will die are delusional. The Reddit as us old people know it has died years ago, it just became unbearable now.