I saw that coming, and honestly everyone else should have too. They own the platform, there’s no reason they would feel forced to back down when they could instead just force subreddits back open and give subreddit moderators the boot if necessary.

We already went through this with Fandom/Wikia. At first they were good, eventually they turned to crap and people wanted to leave and move their wikis elsewhere. Those who tried deleting their wikis had them undeleted. Those who insisted on deleting/locking had the content restored and access taken away from them. Those who linked to their replacement wiki were blocked with all mentions of a replacement wiki removed.

The reality is that reddit will just continue on. Quality of content may (read: will) take a hit, but they don’t care about that. The content doesn’t matter, what matters is that users are served ads, or that people spend money on premium to avoid seeing ads.

Maybe profits long-term will take a hit, if content quality becomes so bad that so many people leave and stop using the site, but corporations aren’t exactly known for long-term decision making. Maybe down the line they’ll start losing profits and make decisions to reverse course , but by that point, it’ll be too late. Everyone will have already moved on.

idk, I just don’t see a situation in which they actually back down in a way that people would be happy with. It’s just never going to happen and the whole blackout protesting was always going to be futile. You can’t effectively protest against something through a platform that has 100% control over everything you do and has all the power to ignore everything you do. You just have to leave and make your community elsewhere. Let it die. It’s their problem now. They want to make bad decisions, they’ll have to live with the long-term consequences of it.