In a comment shared by r/Apple moderator @aaronp613, Reddit cited its Moderator Code of Conduct and said that it has a duty to keep communities “relied upon by thousands or even millions of users” operational. Mods who do not agree to reopen subreddits that have gone private will be removed.
If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team.
Honestly, Reddit is likely to keep on trucking with a decent sized user base no matter what. A massive number of people aren’t gonna leave, if for nothing but simply not wanting to have to change. I think the most likely thing that happens is that Reddit loses a small chunk of people, their growth heavily slows due to competition and a slow trickle of people leaving (but likely offset by the network effect still favouring them for new people), and they take a revenue ding because advertisers aren’t gonna like all this drama.
The Fediverse will probably have a bit more rapid growth as the blackouts still continue in some subs and more people become aware of alternatives to Reddit, but then just grows slowly, with usability being the big barrier to massive adoption.
Mostly power users will leave for something else, which in turn leads to worse content on Reddit.
power users and mods leaving. The big key is how moderation continues on reddit. whether the scab mods and those that stayed are able to control the bots and spam or not. if they can, then reddit continues mostly as normal.
Probably the most realistic comment here. Changes may come, quality may decline, but reddit is here to stay