I have to say, well written article (too bad they only mentioned Beehaw and not Lemmin). Reddit cannot exist without user content and more importantly the moderators who do a hard job for free.
Without moderators, subreddits simply become a free for all, the far west.
I don’t think it’s going to disappear overnight like Digg. I think the most likely situation is Reddit loses a lot of the unique communities, but ultimately they’ll keep the memes and videos and constant reposts and have fresh content on the homepage every day, which is all a lot of casual users care about.
Growth will slow, many of the communities that were really special will fade away or relocate. But they’ll still have memes and reposts so they’ll still have users.
They’ll push that slowly contracting userbase harder and harder to make money. Once they pull the plug on third party apps that paves the way for other changes. NSFW and old.reddit have to be next.
I think they’ll start blocking search engines too, like most social networks do. That will be an absolute travesty as for the last year or so Reddit search results (on google/etc, obviously not Reddit’s actual search, which is horrible) has been a small bastion of useful information amongst a sea of worthless AI generated Amazon affil spam listicle bullshit. (I’m going to be sooo pissed if they do that)