For what it’s worth, this is exactly how Reddit was in the early days. I remember a niche sub being something that had maybe 30-50 members, now basically every subject has a subreddit with communities in the 5000+ range.

Just give it time. If there is a particular community you’re missing, use this as an opportunity to start it over here and start getting people involved.

My opinion is that if Reddit was really concerned about the preservation of their data, they would keep their API open and encourage 3rd-party interactions with their platform.

I think scrambling your data is not only justified, it’s the correct form of protest.

Does it? I hadn’t noticed, I haven’t been over there in quite a while.

I’m pretty content with KBin. As time goes on the content level will increase and hopefully remain at a level which makes it easy to curate my feed and reduce noise. Truth be told Reddit has been getting worse for a long time and being here reflects that. This feels a lot like what Reddit felt like 10 years ago.

Of course it won’t shut down.

Reddit can remove the mods of any sub at any time and simply open the subs back up. They are allowing them to remain shut now as a PR move because it’s a worse look if they take them back by force. But make no mistake - that’s what will happen in the long run.

The thing that is really going to hurt Reddit in the long run is that all of the Reddit links on Google are “breaking” - if someone searches something and a Reddit post comes up as a result, there is about a 7/10 chance that the sub is private and the post isn’t visible. This will hurt Reddit badly in the long run because Google will remove these results if they stay that way for, say 2 - 3 weeks. Then Reddit loses the ad revenue and new user capture they were getting from organic Google traffic. They can’t simply get that back by reopening the subs, either - once those pages are downranked on Google, it will be difficult for them to rebuild the traction to get a high listing. Some have been there for 10+ years.