I’ll say it every time: it’s their platform, their servers, their choice. However, we owe them nothing. If they want to go it alone, we need to let them. Let them hire paid moderators and we should delete our content so they have to create their own.
We built the communities there, we can do it again elsewhere. We have the expertise and the desire.
Reddit chose to be non profitable in order to kill off all internet forums.
It's reddit that's changing the terms, not mods acting up.
It kinda reminds me of what happened to rural buses in Canada. We had small bus companies going all over the place. Greyhound bought them all out and ran the whole thing as a monopoly for a few years.
Then they decided it was too much trouble and shut the operations down.
For the last twenty years there are no rural buses at all. If you want to get from point a to b outside of town, it's flight or drive.
Like everything else. Big money buys out competition and then kills off anything that is not profitable enough. Parasitic private equity take all the money.
Of course smaller companies serving markets the big guys don't want to bother with isn't actually competition. But the big guys want to crush them anyway. So stupid.
That's incredibly sad, and as the other commenter suggested, all too common with big daddy capitalism. I can't describe how angry it makes me, and how powerless those situations make me feel at times. I'm so happy, and proud, when I see communities truly fight back - and I can fight along side then. So often we go out with a wimpe, I want to fight for the things important to me!
There are reports they are undeleting content. The only option is to stop participating.
I've just been sorting my comments by highest score and replacing a dozen or so each day with something like "-> fediverse". So far none have been restored. Most of the lower scored comments don't have value to anyone anyway so I'm just ordering by most impact until I get bored.
Not participating isn't the only choice.
On days I'm feeling particularly petty I go into discussions and vote down the good comments and vote up the bad ones just to make the signal to noise ratio worse. Yes, I'm that petty.
Maybe you don't mind doing it manually, but you can automate it too (at least until the api goes down)
I'd skip the vote one, it's just giving them a bit more traffic stats. Agree with the edit though.
If you wanna be petty, edit your posts into contextual nonsense that looks like it fits, so Reddit gets just a little harder to read.
Damn that's a good idea. Sort by highest karma and make them word soup that makes readers question their sanity. I just went with '.'
Seems the person that spread that was mistaken.
They deleted content that was in public subreddits, then when the privated subreddits started going public again, the posts he made in those became visible again, making it seem certain content he deleted was being undeleted.
So far, there's been no verifiable report of actual undeletion of content.
But besides all that, with GDPR and the similar California laws, Reddit is already asking to get sued and get the EU on their ass, for not deleting peoples data on request, as compliance requires.
"The person that spread that?" Are you being serious? That's happened to a lot of people. It's happened to me repeatedly. In fact I'm right now yet again deleting a bunch of posts that stayed deleted for days and are mysteriously back again.
Yeah, that previous explanation makes no sense -- the YT guy who recorded his entire session was deleting the same stuff over and over again.
That sounds like a server error.
Don't get me wrong. I have no doubt that Reddit has decided to go to war with any unhappy users. I have zero respect left.
Out of self-respect, I will still try to understand whether something is a bug or deliberate.
Are you certain it is the exact same comment or post? I think people are deleting everything (via scripts or whatever--some scripts are known to not work/only appear to be working--particularly ones that make use of pushshift which reddit destroyed a few months prior to this incident), but everything isn't actually everything because of the way reddit hides content in certain situations. When people have posted screenshots it has been content from subreddits that had be set private during protests and reopened. Reddit annoyingly hides your own content from yourself in many circumstances.
I'm not saying these undeletes definitely do not happen, but people have needed to delete content on Reddit for reasons the pre-date the protests. The legal risks to reddit for them to be caught restoring content that a user deliberately deleted is significant. So unless a whistleblower or compelling evidence emerges Occam's razor will go with reddit bugs and "features". Everyone knows reddit is bug-ridden.
Yep, I got a similar case to yours.
Most of that was from subs coming back online. You can only delete visible content. I've been going back every few days and deleting the stuff that came back online.
For what it's worth, I used Power Suite Delete to replace everything in my 14 year account with a deleted message, haven't seen anything get reverted yet.
Engagement is what drives social media. Upvotes, likes, page views, searches are the fuel for their algorithms. (Or at least that's what it seems to me.)
That will come automatically once my 3rd party app doesn't work any more. Hopefully some Lemmy apps will be available in the App Store soon. The website on mobile is quite suboptimal.
I'd be ok with it if it would stop reloading and shifting things around while I'm reading.
That fix is coming very soon, once we upgrade to 0.18.x
we should delete our content so they have to create their own.
Any content that users have posted to reddit became theirs with the TOS you had to agree to first. They've already undeleted user submitted content deleted as part of the protests. I agree it's time to cut them loose and move on, but you won't be able to retroactively stop them from profiting off the content they already have.
A TOS doesn't supersede actual LAW.
I live where the laws are less helpful. EU and California have the helpful ones. But as a non-resident, my understanding is that the law allows full removal of personal info. Deleting posts would be selective removal and doesn't have the "and I live in the right place" question.
You MUST re-open the community you helped build over the years for free so that we can earn BIG monies on teh ads!! Make us monies for FREE slave!! We pay you NUTHIN! You work hard for USSSS!!!! Work when WE tell you too!!!!!! foaming at the mouth with rage
"Landed gentry"... Because that's what I think about when I think about unpaid employees.
Absolute garbage way to treat people. Foreshadowing for how reddit, and probably other places, plan to treat the communities they so love to claim credit for.
Man Reddit is really trying to push a narrative of big bad mean mods, never mentioning they're unpaid and being ignored while doing a shitload of labor
Honestly, that’s probably an underestimate.
3.4m at 20/hr (so 15/hr plus overhead) with 2000 work hours in a year only comes out to ~84 full time employees.
I really doubt they can do what most of the mods do with 84 minimum wage (sf Bay Area) workers.
Even if you outsource, the amount of expertise in specific fields is very hard to find even with money.
Step 1: open the sub.
Step 2: make every member a moderator.
Step 3: watch the world burn.
One subreddit did this IIRC
Can't be done unfortunately. There's a limit to how many pending moderator invites there can be. r/politicalhumor did the next best thing though.
What did they do?
They have a bot running that listens for certain commands in comments, so any user can lock a thread or do a bunch of different stuff just like a mod by commenting
That Google exec's comments along with the Apple showcase of Apollo must have reddit leadership shitting their pants.
So much for the protest having "no effect".
I think prospects of going public via IPO were tanked when a tech giant like Google is publicly venturing opinions about the platform.
I deleted 9 years worth of user content, across 5 different reddit accounts. Followed by CCPA "Delete My Data" demands, on each account.
It's almost as if, a large majority of reddit users are spineless, or consider their useless internet clout points more valuable than a small sense of morality...
A temporary blackout is not a protest compared to this method.
The sheer of panic in Snoo Platform, Inc. means that protest and blackout work.
IPO blackout looks even more good now.
What's an IPO blackout?
I assume they mean go blackout again during Reddit's IPO/Initial Public Offering of Reddit stock in an attempt to tank the stock price.
I'd like to kick Spez in the not stay privates.
The mods make the community. I have modded a few subs and it is a pain to do well, so I stopped doing it. I have definitely had issues with mods (who hasn't), but if large numbers of the good ones leave Reddit is screwed.
I deleted 9 years worth of user content, across 5 different reddit accounts. Followed by CCPA "Delete My Data" demands, on each account.
It's almost as if, a large majority of reddit users are spineless, or consider their useless internet clout points more valuable than a small sense of morality...
A temporary blackout is not a protest compared to this method.
I'm still waiting on the data export (30 days!?) and then I'm editing and deleting all my content.
It’s almost as if, a large majority of reddit users are spineless, or consider their useless internet clout points more valuable than a small sense of morality…
Or they're just, you know... children. Or people who were never familiar with the site pre-official app. I don't mean this in a disparaging way, but reddit 2014 is not the same as reddit 2023. They feel like entirely different websites to an extent (well, visually they actually are).
I'm willing to bet the average age on there right now is probably mid-to-late teens. They most likely use the official app and don't see the need to be involved in this because they weren't on the site when there wasn't an official app like most of us. I doubt many users are even that familiar with the old design.
The whole target market is different now.
I don't think they care about points or clout or whatever. Vast majority of reddit users are lurkers or occasional commenters. Doubt many have all that much karma to spare.
I think they simply don't understand the effects here because to them "third party" isn't something that they knew existed. "API changes" isn't something with a lot of meaning to most users.
The majority simply doesn't care, because in their minds, they don't need to. It's "not their fight". Whether they should care is obviously another story.
We're in a minority. Mods, third party app users, people who have a history with reddit. How many casual reddit users fall into one of those groups? How many into two? How many into all three? Not a lot.
This is, and always has been, a protest by a minority of reddit's users. One you, me, and the thousands of people who left reddit for Lemmy/kbin/Fedi support, but not one that a lot of casual users felt any resonance with.
The situation is a lot more nuanced when it comes to reddit users as a whole. It's not a simple "with us or against us" situation as some like to believe.
Yes. Mods form a very important minority.
I've seen statistics showing that most of the traffic returned. I wonder, how long will that last without good mods?
100%.
Reddit is mostly lurkers. I'm (well, was) one of them. People get thousands of upvotes, but not thousands of replies.
When mods lose the tooling that they need and spam maybe starts slipping through, I expect one of two things (or both) will happen:
A) They blame the mods. Doesn't matter if it's new mods or old ones. They'll say the old ones are doing it on purpose because they "lost the protest" and the new ones "don't know what they're doing and only want the power".
B) Traffic dips slowly. Very slowly. There might be a major drop in a couple of days, but it'll rise up to similar levels once people are "fuck it" and use the official app. That's what reddit's counting on, and they're not wrong. I'm guessing the amount of people who leave permanently is significantly lower than the amount of people who "just want to use reddit".
I also expect reddit to fuck up again. Every few years, they do and alienate a bunch of users. I doubt it'll be a major, site-killing fuck up, but there's probably going to be "waves" in which a portion ditches the site. They'll typically gain enough users to make up for it, but quality will probably get worse over time.
It's funny because I'm guessing a bunch of people who right now are all "don't know why you're complaining" will be loudly protesting when reddit does some other shit and suddenly those people will be hearing "don't know why you're complaining". Cycle continues.
I'm not sure. Normally, most users would come back as you describe. But if the lack of mods gets too serious, then most users will begin to get bored or annoyed. If other platforms scale up well, boredom translates into "I heard about....."
I miss the days when actual, breaking news would be on the front page almost immediately. It hasn’t been that way for years…
It’s funny, I don’t miss it at all.
I hope more communities think of migrating to other places instead of staying on reddit. It's getting worse with each passing day.
The dumpster fire continues to burn. As Demi Lovato would say "Let it go, Let it go, can't hold it back anymore"
Looks like they're holding out big hopes for July 1st to be the platform's big resurgence, and that everything will calm down once they throw the switch on API access. Sure, let us know how that works out for you, Digg 5.0.
If I'm being honest 1st of July will most likely be the last big splash and the last big grow for the alternative platforms. Afterwards I don't think the growth of Lemmy or similar platforms will be as big. Most of the mods will be silenced, subs opened and in 1-2 weeks it will be forgotten.
Reddit is way bigger than Digg was back then, has an impressive number of users so it's pretty hard to bring it to its knees. I hope I am wrong and that I am just pessimistic.
However I think the bad part for Reddit is that knowledgeable people and people you can hold a discussion with or to ask for help in different areas, are leaving/have left Reddit so the quality of posts will dilute.
It will definitely be a slow death. The sound of a few engaged users uniting in protest isn't what will scare Reddit. The sound that will scare them is the sound of many casual users going "Meh" when minimally-moderated subs plagued with spammers and repost bots finally bore the doom-scrolling zombies looking for a momentary dopamine rush from Tik-Tok videos and easily digestible memes.
If the more engaged posters have moved over, do we really need the lurkers and mediocre posters to prop up the new discussion locations?
It was nice having everything in one place, but if everyone came over then it would just be the same thing on a new platform.
Subs opened... with who moderating?
Reddit has no fucking backup plan if the mods decide to bail. What happens? Communities go unmoderated, or randos take over which is even WORSE since randos bring about the possibility of the sub being shat up on purpose.
Keep in mind that Digg is around to this day. These actions won't sink Reddit overnight. And Reddit isn't done cleaning up for the IPO. As they do more and more of these prep actions, more users will bleed out. Hopefully the Fediverse gets more and more traffic to be a place other users look towards.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I haven't been back to reddit since the blackouts started. No desire to.
I’ll say it every time: it’s their platform, their servers, their choice. However, we owe them nothing. If they want to go it alone, we need to let them. Let them hire paid moderators and we should delete our content so they have to create their own.
We built the communities there, we can do it again elsewhere. We have the expertise and the desire.
Reddit chose to be non profitable in order to kill off all internet forums.
It's reddit that's changing the terms, not mods acting up.
It kinda reminds me of what happened to rural buses in Canada. We had small bus companies going all over the place. Greyhound bought them all out and ran the whole thing as a monopoly for a few years.
Then they decided it was too much trouble and shut the operations down.
For the last twenty years there are no rural buses at all. If you want to get from point a to b outside of town, it's flight or drive.
Like everything else. Big money buys out competition and then kills off anything that is not profitable enough. Parasitic private equity take all the money.
Of course smaller companies serving markets the big guys don't want to bother with isn't actually competition. But the big guys want to crush them anyway. So stupid.
That's incredibly sad, and as the other commenter suggested, all too common with big daddy capitalism. I can't describe how angry it makes me, and how powerless those situations make me feel at times. I'm so happy, and proud, when I see communities truly fight back - and I can fight along side then. So often we go out with a wimpe, I want to fight for the things important to me!
There are reports they are undeleting content. The only option is to stop participating.
I've just been sorting my comments by highest score and replacing a dozen or so each day with something like "-> fediverse". So far none have been restored. Most of the lower scored comments don't have value to anyone anyway so I'm just ordering by most impact until I get bored.
Not participating isn't the only choice.
On days I'm feeling particularly petty I go into discussions and vote down the good comments and vote up the bad ones just to make the signal to noise ratio worse. Yes, I'm that petty.
Maybe you don't mind doing it manually, but you can automate it too (at least until the api goes down)
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
I'd skip the vote one, it's just giving them a bit more traffic stats. Agree with the edit though.
If you wanna be petty, edit your posts into contextual nonsense that looks like it fits, so Reddit gets just a little harder to read.
Damn that's a good idea. Sort by highest karma and make them word soup that makes readers question their sanity. I just went with '.'
Seems the person that spread that was mistaken.
They deleted content that was in public subreddits, then when the privated subreddits started going public again, the posts he made in those became visible again, making it seem certain content he deleted was being undeleted.
So far, there's been no verifiable report of actual undeletion of content.
But besides all that, with GDPR and the similar California laws, Reddit is already asking to get sued and get the EU on their ass, for not deleting peoples data on request, as compliance requires.
"The person that spread that?" Are you being serious? That's happened to a lot of people. It's happened to me repeatedly. In fact I'm right now yet again deleting a bunch of posts that stayed deleted for days and are mysteriously back again.
Yeah, that previous explanation makes no sense -- the YT guy who recorded his entire session was deleting the same stuff over and over again.
That sounds like a server error.
Don't get me wrong. I have no doubt that Reddit has decided to go to war with any unhappy users. I have zero respect left.
Out of self-respect, I will still try to understand whether something is a bug or deliberate.
Are you certain it is the exact same comment or post? I think people are deleting everything (via scripts or whatever--some scripts are known to not work/only appear to be working--particularly ones that make use of pushshift which reddit destroyed a few months prior to this incident), but everything isn't actually everything because of the way reddit hides content in certain situations. When people have posted screenshots it has been content from subreddits that had be set private during protests and reopened. Reddit annoyingly hides your own content from yourself in many circumstances.
I'm not saying these undeletes definitely do not happen, but people have needed to delete content on Reddit for reasons the pre-date the protests. The legal risks to reddit for them to be caught restoring content that a user deliberately deleted is significant. So unless a whistleblower or compelling evidence emerges Occam's razor will go with reddit bugs and "features". Everyone knows reddit is bug-ridden.
Yep, I got a similar case to yours.
Most of that was from subs coming back online. You can only delete visible content. I've been going back every few days and deleting the stuff that came back online.
For what it's worth, I used Power Suite Delete to replace everything in my 14 year account with a deleted message, haven't seen anything get reverted yet.
Engagement is what drives social media. Upvotes, likes, page views, searches are the fuel for their algorithms. (Or at least that's what it seems to me.)
That will come automatically once my 3rd party app doesn't work any more. Hopefully some Lemmy apps will be available in the App Store soon. The website on mobile is quite suboptimal.
I'd be ok with it if it would stop reloading and shifting things around while I'm reading.
That fix is coming very soon, once we upgrade to 0.18.x
I'm so happy to hear that! Thank you <3
Added to @BestOf!
Any content that users have posted to reddit became theirs with the TOS you had to agree to first. They've already undeleted user submitted content deleted as part of the protests. I agree it's time to cut them loose and move on, but you won't be able to retroactively stop them from profiting off the content they already have.
A TOS doesn't supersede actual LAW.
I live where the laws are less helpful. EU and California have the helpful ones. But as a non-resident, my understanding is that the law allows full removal of personal info. Deleting posts would be selective removal and doesn't have the "and I live in the right place" question.
You MUST re-open the community you helped build over the years for free so that we can earn BIG monies on teh ads!! Make us monies for FREE slave!! We pay you NUTHIN! You work hard for USSSS!!!! Work when WE tell you too!!!!!! foaming at the mouth with rage
"Landed gentry"... Because that's what I think about when I think about unpaid employees.
Absolute garbage way to treat people. Foreshadowing for how reddit, and probably other places, plan to treat the communities they so love to claim credit for.
Man Reddit is really trying to push a narrative of big bad mean mods, never mentioning they're unpaid and being ignored while doing a shitload of labor
Estimated $3.4 million dollars of free labor per year.
Honestly, that’s probably an underestimate. 3.4m at 20/hr (so 15/hr plus overhead) with 2000 work hours in a year only comes out to ~84 full time employees.
I really doubt they can do what most of the mods do with 84 minimum wage (sf Bay Area) workers.
Even if you outsource, the amount of expertise in specific fields is very hard to find even with money.
Step 1: open the sub.
Step 2: make every member a moderator.
Step 3: watch the world burn.
One subreddit did this IIRC
Can't be done unfortunately. There's a limit to how many pending moderator invites there can be. r/politicalhumor did the next best thing though.
What did they do?
They have a bot running that listens for certain commands in comments, so any user can lock a thread or do a bunch of different stuff just like a mod by commenting
That Google exec's comments along with the Apple showcase of Apollo must have reddit leadership shitting their pants.
So much for the protest having "no effect".
I think prospects of going public via IPO were tanked when a tech giant like Google is publicly venturing opinions about the platform.
I deleted 9 years worth of user content, across 5 different reddit accounts. Followed by CCPA "Delete My Data" demands, on each account.
It's almost as if, a large majority of reddit users are spineless, or consider their useless internet clout points more valuable than a small sense of morality...
A temporary blackout is not a protest compared to this method.
For those wondering... TamperMonkey browser add-on with RedditHistorySanitizer userscript (https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/23605-reddit-history-sanitizer/code). It's kinda slow, but much faster than doing it manually!
Can't wait for Monday!
The sheer of panic in Snoo Platform, Inc. means that protest and blackout work.
IPO blackout looks even more good now.
What's an IPO blackout?
I assume they mean go blackout again during Reddit's IPO/Initial Public Offering of Reddit stock in an attempt to tank the stock price.
I'd like to kick Spez in the not stay privates.
The mods make the community. I have modded a few subs and it is a pain to do well, so I stopped doing it. I have definitely had issues with mods (who hasn't), but if large numbers of the good ones leave Reddit is screwed.
Whoa! Negative 1 comments!
What app is that?
Memmy
Do it. Show your true colors, Reddit.
I deleted 9 years worth of user content, across 5 different reddit accounts. Followed by CCPA "Delete My Data" demands, on each account.
It's almost as if, a large majority of reddit users are spineless, or consider their useless internet clout points more valuable than a small sense of morality...
A temporary blackout is not a protest compared to this method.
For those wondering... TamperMonkey browser add-on with RedditHistorySanitizer userscript (https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/23605-reddit-history-sanitizer/code). It's kinda slow, but much faster than doing it manually!
I'm still waiting on the data export (30 days!?) and then I'm editing and deleting all my content.
Or they're just, you know... children. Or people who were never familiar with the site pre-official app. I don't mean this in a disparaging way, but reddit 2014 is not the same as reddit 2023. They feel like entirely different websites to an extent (well, visually they actually are).
I'm willing to bet the average age on there right now is probably mid-to-late teens. They most likely use the official app and don't see the need to be involved in this because they weren't on the site when there wasn't an official app like most of us. I doubt many users are even that familiar with the old design.
The whole target market is different now.
I don't think they care about points or clout or whatever. Vast majority of reddit users are lurkers or occasional commenters. Doubt many have all that much karma to spare.
I think they simply don't understand the effects here because to them "third party" isn't something that they knew existed. "API changes" isn't something with a lot of meaning to most users.
The majority simply doesn't care, because in their minds, they don't need to. It's "not their fight". Whether they should care is obviously another story.
We're in a minority. Mods, third party app users, people who have a history with reddit. How many casual reddit users fall into one of those groups? How many into two? How many into all three? Not a lot.
This is, and always has been, a protest by a minority of reddit's users. One you, me, and the thousands of people who left reddit for Lemmy/kbin/Fedi support, but not one that a lot of casual users felt any resonance with.
The situation is a lot more nuanced when it comes to reddit users as a whole. It's not a simple "with us or against us" situation as some like to believe.
Yes. Mods form a very important minority.
I've seen statistics showing that most of the traffic returned. I wonder, how long will that last without good mods?
100%.
Reddit is mostly lurkers. I'm (well, was) one of them. People get thousands of upvotes, but not thousands of replies.
When mods lose the tooling that they need and spam maybe starts slipping through, I expect one of two things (or both) will happen:
A) They blame the mods. Doesn't matter if it's new mods or old ones. They'll say the old ones are doing it on purpose because they "lost the protest" and the new ones "don't know what they're doing and only want the power".
B) Traffic dips slowly. Very slowly. There might be a major drop in a couple of days, but it'll rise up to similar levels once people are "fuck it" and use the official app. That's what reddit's counting on, and they're not wrong. I'm guessing the amount of people who leave permanently is significantly lower than the amount of people who "just want to use reddit".
I also expect reddit to fuck up again. Every few years, they do and alienate a bunch of users. I doubt it'll be a major, site-killing fuck up, but there's probably going to be "waves" in which a portion ditches the site. They'll typically gain enough users to make up for it, but quality will probably get worse over time.
It's funny because I'm guessing a bunch of people who right now are all "don't know why you're complaining" will be loudly protesting when reddit does some other shit and suddenly those people will be hearing "don't know why you're complaining". Cycle continues.
I'm not sure. Normally, most users would come back as you describe. But if the lack of mods gets too serious, then most users will begin to get bored or annoyed. If other platforms scale up well, boredom translates into "I heard about....."
I miss the days when actual, breaking news would be on the front page almost immediately. It hasn’t been that way for years…
It’s funny, I don’t miss it at all.
I hope more communities think of migrating to other places instead of staying on reddit. It's getting worse with each passing day.
The dumpster fire continues to burn. As Demi Lovato would say "Let it go, Let it go, can't hold it back anymore"
Looks like they're holding out big hopes for July 1st to be the platform's big resurgence, and that everything will calm down once they throw the switch on API access. Sure, let us know how that works out for you, Digg 5.0.
If I'm being honest 1st of July will most likely be the last big splash and the last big grow for the alternative platforms. Afterwards I don't think the growth of Lemmy or similar platforms will be as big. Most of the mods will be silenced, subs opened and in 1-2 weeks it will be forgotten.
Reddit is way bigger than Digg was back then, has an impressive number of users so it's pretty hard to bring it to its knees. I hope I am wrong and that I am just pessimistic.
However I think the bad part for Reddit is that knowledgeable people and people you can hold a discussion with or to ask for help in different areas, are leaving/have left Reddit so the quality of posts will dilute.
It will definitely be a slow death. The sound of a few engaged users uniting in protest isn't what will scare Reddit. The sound that will scare them is the sound of many casual users going "Meh" when minimally-moderated subs plagued with spammers and repost bots finally bore the doom-scrolling zombies looking for a momentary dopamine rush from Tik-Tok videos and easily digestible memes.
If the more engaged posters have moved over, do we really need the lurkers and mediocre posters to prop up the new discussion locations?
It was nice having everything in one place, but if everyone came over then it would just be the same thing on a new platform.
Subs opened... with who moderating?
Reddit has no fucking backup plan if the mods decide to bail. What happens? Communities go unmoderated, or randos take over which is even WORSE since randos bring about the possibility of the sub being shat up on purpose.
Keep in mind that Digg is around to this day. These actions won't sink Reddit overnight. And Reddit isn't done cleaning up for the IPO. As they do more and more of these prep actions, more users will bleed out. Hopefully the Fediverse gets more and more traffic to be a place other users look towards.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I haven't been back to reddit since the blackouts started. No desire to.