The last major holdouts in the protest against Reddit’s API pricing relented, abandoning the so-called “John Oliver rules” which only allowed posts featuring the TV host. It's the official end of the battle. The Reddit protest is over, and Reddit won.
Reddit’s valuation is down from $15B when they closed their last round of pre-IPO funding. They were hovering in the $5B neighborhood before the APIpocalypse, and I find it hard to imagine that they’ve gained significant value since then. That’s a loss of 2/3 of the investments from their institutional partners and VCs. I hardly think they’re feeling like they deserve a victory lap.
The only reason why you wouldn’t pull an IPO due to a company’s value cratering by 2/3 is because people are looking to get whatever cash they can out of it before it completely collapses. If reddit were a healthy company, the valuation tanking would never have happened. If they were a survivable company, they would have pulled the IPO and made the organizational and policy changes necessary to restore at least some measure of value.
Spez is Musking the site because, like Musk, he is watching his business crash and burn and he has no idea what to do beyond making people pay him to be allowed to create and moderate content he can then resell.
The effects of the decisions being made will not be immediately obvious, especially when reddit doesn’t publish KPIs that show they’re hemorrhaging value. Twitter is notorious for releasing clutching-at-straws metrics in order to not have to address that the company Elon paid $44B for is now worth about $20B and falling.
Firing the mods and replacing them or bringing them to heel is at best a pyrrhic victory because they have not yet figured out how to stem the bleeding, and spez idolizing Musk’s moves at twitter shouldn’t instill a lot of confidence.