I think we'll see a exodus of experienced mods. Maybe even older (account age), more active users. I doubt we'll see a mass exodus of general users. The site is too big. Even if a million people left, there are still millions more.

Yeah an exodus of mods and more active users will hurt, but not enough to kill the site anytime soon. The site culture will change because of this, but the site culture is always changing. Reddit's not the same as it was 5yrs ago or 10yrs ago. Not saying it was better back then, just different.

If there's anything I've learned about social media users -- AKA everyone -- it's that people don't usually care too much about the platform and the company behind it, as long as content is entertaining. That they can keep consuming.

TikTok is the perfect example: the Chinese govt is potentially get all that user data. It's concerning enough that other governments have or are considering banning it. Have people left en masse? Nope. My coworkers still share TikTok videos all the time.

Or how about Facebook and Co.? Facebook has made all sorts of terrible UI changes over the years. That people got angry over. Hell, it's sold user data without user consent. It pumped out enough fake news that it swung an election! It's still probably the largest social media platform in the world.

Or about about Twitter? I'll admit, I'm still on Twitter as a lurker. And my feed is still just as active as it ever was. There's no mass exodus, even with that crazy CEO at the helm.

YouTube pisses people off, especially the content creators, with their algorithm changes and unknowing demonetization rules. They and the viewers are still there, pumping out and consuming content.

While I've been on reddit for nearly 13yrs, I didn't come from Digg. So I don't know why people did leave wholesale for reddit. But I'm starting to think that that was an outlier. And there is something to be said about Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok not really having good alternatives. Twitter does with Mastodon, but it's still nowhere near Twitter's userbase.

I don't know how much Beehaw and the Lemmyverse as a whole has grown in the last month, but something tells me it's still orders of magnitude smaller than reddit. I'm on Tildes -- which does have a restrictive registration policy -- and it's only grown by about 7000 new users in the last ~3 weeks.

I think this could be the beginning of the end of reddit. But it's still way too soon to tell and any results would be far off. It could also be nothing like Spez says. And historically, a massive social media platform dying off hasn't really happened unless the company pulled the plug themselves (Google+). Or it's Digg.