Oh, reddit will survive, it'll just be even shittier than before. And maybe it'll bounce back to somewhere close to what it was, but in the meantime, there's now a growing viable alternative.

My recommendation for anyone who decides to visit reddit adopt a comment signature promoting startrek.website along with a link to a new user tutorial and a quick explanation of why we left. Keep picking them off and make our existence common knowledge over there.

I think this is a important take - as far as users are concerned Reddit merely hosts the content and the community, but as far as Reddit is concerned it owns the content and wants to monetise the community.

The problem for Reddit is the moderation is done by users who do it for free, mostly because they love their communities and want to keep them going. Those people are not easy to replace - plenty of communities shut because no one wanted to moderate them, and plenty of users just aren't interested. So if they lose the moderators, there is a small pool of people to replace them and many of those may not be motivated in the same way. There will also be bad actors amongst those untested moderators.

Lose the moderators, and the communities fall apart as bad content, rule breaking and negative behaviour takes hold. The "content" becomes lost and the value of what reddit things it owns falls massively. An archive of old reddit comments is actually not worth much - sure people google things and find answers on Reddit - but it's the current active users and daily content that draws people in.

I think Reddit is doomed as it is failing to understand it's own business and what made the site successful.

It may be forever smaller

I would honestly consider this a feature, not a bug.

Most social media runs by the 90/9/1 rule. 90% of users lurk, 9% of users post, 1% of users produce content.

I'm hoping that this house cleaning changes those numbers up some.

I know that a lot of people are afraid to post. They may not believe that they have anything interesting to say. And they may not trust their ability to write coherently. Some of you folks are intimidatingly good at writing insightful posts and making it understandable to everybody.

Maybe with a smaller community we can encourage more people to take part and, paradoxically, become more diverse.

I'd also like to encourage everybody to attempt to post something interesting. A pet theory. A reinterpretation of a scene. It doesn't really matter. You can only get better by doing and we all benefit from new ideas. Don't be afraid to sound like a fool. It's kinda my default state and I'm still here.

I don't know. I haven't been back since the day the move was announced. So if they have decided to reopen, be it old mods or not, all the power to them. I don't care any more.

All pictures, videos, and discussion must have John Oliver in them somewhere.

I'm loving the malicious compliance arch

Probably. There's nothing said about how active the moderators have to be, and there are a few who would happily claim the role, even if they aren't going to do anything with it, except to step in when other mods do something they dislike (since Reddit's mod privilege system is hierarchical, higher mods outright lower ones, and can remove them if desired). /r/Tumblr basically had that problem, with the only recently active mod being kicked off by both Reddit, and one of the higher moderators, who opened the sub back up (its back private now, citing a "disinformation campaign", so the users probably rioted, given the support for a shut down). There's a suggestion that it was a Reddit scab who suddenly became active, and booted said mod, but that could be either rumour or fact, since there's not a lot of supporting evidence in either direction, except that said user is not on the site, nor moderator on /r/tumblr any longer.

Reddit does have an issue with "power mods", where a user will just collect moderation roles in subreddits, so there are a few who would probably just add a few new subs to the list.

What happens afterwards probably depends on the user base. While they could probably try and silence dissent, no few people can handle multiple riots going across multiple subs they moderate.