- Of course, if Reddit were a fascist regime, it'd be a pretty terrible one: a place where you could keep a ticker of open revolt in real-time as rebels occasionally march to the central plaza to confront the machinery of alleged fascism. The rebels are advancing on r/politics, sir. The military is holding out at r/books. Shelter in place. But the most meaningful battle on Reddit has already been fought, and the results are right in front of everyone's face. The algorithm wins.
The author seems to have missed that this most recent outrage is not about the allowance of hate-speech (which is very much alive on reddit, just as much as it was when Ellen Pao joined as CEO. In fact, none of the worst ones have been closed. Check out /r/coontown /r/European /r/AntiPozi, etc) it's about the intentional steering of core features towards commercialisation. Things like making AMAs more controllable by the Celebrity/Public Figure hosting it, letting Companies push their products more heavily disguised as regular posts, etc. Vocal redditors don't want this. The average user might not care all that much, but the "Vocal minority" as Poe entitled them, are responsible for a majority of the good content. If they are driven away, reddit is going to plummet in value.
I think that's a pretty big assumption. If the 'vocal minority' of a site leaves, but behind it stand literally millions of users who demand, supply, and consume content which can generate ad-revenue then Reddit will win completely. Even as the majority of 'good content' was consumed by the vocal minority, making minority blocs happy is not the best path to profit. That's the path to principles.
I saw a post recently on r/bestof about how those of the vocal minority ARE the most important. The mods, the people who produce content, the people who care - that's who matters. The majority does not care they are on Reddit; they care that they're absorbing videos and pictures and news. So if the vocal minority moves and stops producing content... The majority will follow right behind, like lambs following their mother.
In a sea of millions there are plenty of new mods who will step up and take the reigns. Some of the really small subs might die off when their primary mods leaves, but most people aren't in the really small subs or they wouldn't be small. If r/gaming staged a walk out tomorrow and forever, there would be a dozen people stepping up to fill those mod seats tomorrow. And Reddit would let them happily. The problem is that Reddit mods don't really create content. They help in its aggregation, and this is not a unique skill-set which would prevent a new generation of mods from coming about. Even if they wrecked the place on the way out by deleting all the CSS that made the sub unique, Reddit would just restore it for the new tenants. There are seriously talented mods out there who writing the CSS and meticulously curating major subs for no pay, and there are a dozen more waiting for them to leave so that they can do the same thing. Enough people want power, even if its on the internet, to make Reddit really hard to kill.
I think it would be interesting depending on how fast mods are hemorrhaged. If the majority of the large subreddit moderators left overnight it would be very difficult for their shoes to be filled. It takes a different skillset than moderating smaller subreddits. The transition period where the new mods learned how to deal with it would be rough. If the bottom fell out overnight it would also spark outrage amongst the users. If it was slower the userbase probably wouldn't notice.
I don't think anyone is expecting reddit to up and die in a matter of days. The more reddit drama goes on though the more people will look to other sites to share content. Sure people might still go to reddit and well as new sites (such as hubski or voat) but it will be the secondary site. As more drama happens and more people make reddit the secondary site, all of reddit's content will become stale and irrelevant. When this happens reddit will die slowly not overnight.
Yeah ~ I mean Digg.com still exists, right?~ http://digg.com/.. ..oh wait no.. it doesn't exist.. it's a blog now...