Here’s what I think will happen.
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Spez will forcibly depose and ban moderators who participate in the blackout and install his own yes-men to reopen these communities. A lot of power users will fold and jump back to Reddit’s side, out of fear that they’ll lose their foothold on the site.
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Communities like /r/RedditAlternatives will be banned by the admins, along with the communities of any alternative social media platforms that are in direct competition with Reddit. Some subreddits focused around Lemmy instances have already been purged by the admins and I see them quadrupling down on this.
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Reddit sheds a few million of its active users but the API changes and death of third-party apps don’t completely kill the site because now it’s pretty mainstream and a lot of people actually don’t give a shit about Apollo, RIF, etc. I think the main difficulty of a site replacing Reddit is that Reddit clones are now a-dime-a-dozen.
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Porn-focused communities decide to leave the site and start their own website (perhaps a Lemmy instance or a standalone site that aims to compete with places like Fansly or OnlyFans), because they see the exclusion of NSFW material from the API is a precursor to a total porn-ban.
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Reddit announces its IPO and still raises a lot of capital.
Would any power user ever want to touch reddit with the longest pole if the first half of point 1 happened?
No, but are power users necessary? Most of the front page subreddits are just “post whatever you want here” and they have more than enough 14 year old posters to keep the site saturated.
Power users are more likely to use more server resources and less likely to see ads. They probably specifically do not want them.
It would basically transform into a Facebook platform if anything, so it’s easy to see how it can begin it’s very slow decline.
There are about 13k moderators participating in the blackout IIRC - I don’t think reddit will have the resources or the community goodwill to take over all of the major subs
Looks like #2 is starting to get realized: https://beehaw.org/post/487504
