It can go one of a few ways.
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Apart from the few subs that remain offline, it’ll basically be back to normal. Those that do remain offline indefinitely just get forcibly reopened or recreated by admins, especially huge subreddits like /r/videos. Smaller ones just get redicted to /r/topicnew or some other creative name.
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A lot of subreddits and more importantly moderators and users leave the site permanently. In order for this to happen however, there’d have to be a consensus alternative, which there isn’t ATM. Otherwise, these communities are pretty much lost forever unless the mods put a message to go to X alternative service in the “subreddit is private” banner. Tbh, I don’t think people are gonna stomach losing years of their lives in an instant so they’ll just re create subreddits unless the mods provide an alternative.
No matter what though, they’re not backing down on the effective removal of the API (still leaving the sneaky clause “you can pay us if you want but it’ll be a king’s ransom” for AI, even though they can just trawl the web manually lol). They’ll probably announce some crappy customization features to hoodwink those who don’t know what an API is and lie to them and say it’s “API v2” or whatever.
I just honestly don’t know how it’s going to shake out and I’m scared im going to lose these communities. I don’t give a single solitary fuck about Reddit the company anymore, and I never did really. I just hope all of the subreddits find a new home and don’t just shrug their shoulders and say “welp, guess that’s it guys”.
The blackout was to show numbers- it was not a small minority of users that cared, but rather a significant majority. Pissing off most of your users, especially your most active users, is generally a bad business move.
The real question is what people will do on July 1. Will those same users cave and switch to the official app? Reddit is counting on most users doing that, or at least enough to make it a profitable move. I personally will not.
I will only see Reddit when it comes up from a Google search, and will not get involved in the conversations. Some of my communities are already permanently dead, and others severely weakened. But others are fine, since most users there are already on the official app.
As the quality drops, more people leave, and fewer people join. Reddit could cease to be a central hub and become more niche. It could also turn into a cesspool. There are some signs that neo-nazis and otherwise shitty people will take over, not unlike we are seeing with Twitter. Or it could all blow over, and this was all just a bump in the road for Reddit.
I guarantee you that vast majority of users will use the official app because they’re addicted to reddit. There is no readily available alternative around, and after some grumbling most people will go back to it. None of these protests really work unless there is a viable alternative available.
Reddit could cease to be a central hub, that’s not going to happen any time in the foreseeable future. However, I still don’t see why people keep perseverating over reddit. At the end of the day why does it matter. Lemmy exists, it works fine and people who really want to break from reddit have that option now. Whether majority of people does so or not doesn’t really matter all that much to me.