Trust is the hardest thing to reclaim once lost, and this isn't the first break. Big social is having problems, it's the natural course of things.

I'm not going back, epescially since Apollo will be shutting down. I'm looking forward to what the dev can do with the Mlem iOS app, and I'm very interested in the community that is being built here.

Reddit is absolutely, 100% certainly not going to step back on these change. They've made up their mind long ago.

But just for the hypothetical: I think they lost a LOT of trust with the two most essential parts of the community - users and mods. Also the company (or rather, its CEO) may have taken significant image damage due to the "AMA" spez did.

I think business will go on as usual, but the decline will be more and more noticable over time. It will go the way of Digg. Unless of course reddit decides to hire moderation themselves. But we all know they probably wont want do do that. The course seems set to selling the data they have already accumulated.

Reddit showed their hand and I'm just done with all these corpos. Reddit is my last hold out and I'm slowly leaving that too. I'm moving to the decentralized FOSS future that I believe in where we the people have the power.

I fully support all the reasons for ditching Reddit altogether, but if I can’t use Apollo, I’ll only ever use it on desktop, and even then just to look stuff up via Google.

Installed Mlem and have committed to making this place a good one.

For me, they'd have to

1. Replace /u/spez
2. Implement some sort of publicly auditable accountability re: shadowbans and database-level comment editing
3. Open-source significant parts of their platform.

I have zero expectation that any of these things will happen. The most healthy way forward, for an open and free internet, is the meritocracy of the fediverse.

People would go back.

The CEO just tripled down and said they are not changing their intended API pricing regardless of how many subs and users go dark.

Even if they did, I think a lot of redditors have been fed up with some things with Reddit (both the company and the first-party app) for a while.

Of course, there will be people who just don't care and will continue to go about their redditing as usual, and those who will go back. A fair number of my close friends don't care at all as they use the first-party app, have no complaints, don't moderate any subreddits, and don't follow the Internet news.

I would love to see my primary communities move over to federated social platforms. It reminds me of the Web1.0 and earlier Web2.0 days.