It’s hard to say what the impact will be because I only about the platform from the perspective of an end-user.

I think the user migration will not hurt reddit in a significant way. 95% of the users are not tech literate and use whatever garbage app the tech companies force upon them.

On the flipside a lot of moderators are complaining that some mobile apps helped them immensely in moderation and the official app does not have the features they want yet. Mods are very important in maintaining the quality of the site. So if there is any damage it could come from moderators not moderating.

Even this is a bit muddy because moderating from PC browser will remain unaffected. There are some browser extensions like toolbox which will continue to work and their devs will likely continue to provide free labour for Reddit.

If big subreddits’ moderators would close down their sub properly it could hurt Reddit and make them backtrack or do something really stupid like forcibly removing belligerent moderators. But unfortunately only a handful subs have decided to indefinitely shut down their subreddits in protest. Most have tepidly decided to do an inconsequential two day shutdown.

Let’s wait and see what happens.

I’m just happy that alternatives will be fed with more eyeballs over the coming months. It’s not going to die overnight like digg did but it’s started bleeding and it’s not going to stop.

Yeah. It’ll definitely hurt the brand irreparably.

kewl