This whole thing seems just crazy to me. Here's how I imagine Reddit dying. Day 0: The API is shut off / too expensive / whatever. Day 1: Moderators leave be

This whole thing seems just crazy to me. Here's how I imagine Reddit dying. Day 0: The API is shut off / too expensive / whatever. Day 1: Moderators leave because their tools / apps were taken away, or because they were removed from their position by administrators. Day 2-365: Popular communities end up having more and more flamewars / low-quality comments / off-topic posts, etc. A second tier of moderators filled the power vacuum, but they aren't as good as the original moderators. They mostly stepped up to fulfill their desire to control, not their desire to curate and nurture. Day 366-500: The average user realizes they don't enjoy reading the subreddits they used to frequent. All the comments are mean and all the posts are off-topic. Their comments don't get upvoted. They stop posting, but keep lurking, occasionally. Day 500: The average user realizes, after refreshing r/all whenever they're bored and having nothing interesting come up, they don't need to visit Reddit anymore. Day 530: The first derivative of active user count trends below zero. Day 1000: "An update on Reddit: it's been an amazing journey." I don't care about Reddit that much (but do read it nearly every day), and I think this is the dumbest thing they could possibly do. If people work for you for free, you do everything you can to make them happy. Let them use their ad-blocker. Let them trumpet a random social cause once a year. Do not touch. It's a sensitive balance; without curation, your whole site dies. You can't make decisions that piss off the curators and creators. I think you have a little more leeway with the lurkers. It would probably have been more profitable and less harmful to just charge every user a 1-time $5 fee. It's a tested model (hello Metafilter), and it doesn't change anyone's day-to-day. At this point, it's too late, people will burn the headquarters to the ground if you suggest it... but it could have worked if you just needed cash. Some random off-topic thoughts: 1) The reason people need third-party apps is because the first-party app is terrible. How many years has "new Reddit" been a thing, and the video player still doesn't work? Why does clicking on the page outside of the comment-composition textarea cancel writing a comment? Like do the designers not know that Windows and Linux pass window-focus clicks through to the application (whereas MacOS eats that click)? 2) Reading Reddit during all of this, and most people don't notice or care. That's why this isn't a crisis today; but something that will sloooowly get worse over time as moderators / power users leave the platform. It will be a very slow death, hidden by general user growth (new people being born or whatever) for quite a while. So if things look good to you today, you're not out of the woods. 3) Stop letting the CEO talk and get a different PR department. Elon Musk can be a jerk to everyone because he's the richest person in the world. You are not.