Indeed - I think they'll manage to find mods but the quality is certainly going to leave something to be desired.

I agree that coming on as a mod would be undesirable in this climate, but I do think a lot of us as part of the protest have a bit of a blind spot. Reddit may be hurt from this, and they may slowly start losing users, especially if Lemmy or another good alternative start taking off, but let's be a little realistic here. Lemmy has a total user base of around 112,000 people as of yesterday, though I'm sure a fair few of these accounts are the same person (I have 3 Lemmy accounts on three instances). Reddit has over 50 million daily users. (Lemmy's active monthly user count is around 15,000 right now). Reddit's monthly user count is 1.6 BILLION. If Reddit is 'dying', Lemmy has been dead and buried. (Yes, I know one is growing and one is shrinking this week, but it's a little naive to think that will definitely stay that way.)

Could Reddit eventually die and an alternative rise in its place? Certainly, but it's going to be a couple years off.

In every situation in real life where there is a corrupt person on the brink of losing their position of power, there are dozens of people silently ready to give up their morals to be the next anointed person of power in that position.

The next moderators will be the ones who innately want the new Reddit to succeed. I imagine the newly chosen moderators of the largest communities are those power users/top posters who have been wanting to be a mod for a long time. Here is their chance. They will be given free Premium Reddit and have no problem with ads because they won't see them.

This streamlining of the mods is great for business -- you don't have competing narratives and you still have people doing cheap or almost free labor. It's a thinning of the herd.

Reddit replacing the rebellious mods with complicit mods is going to happen, and it will be good for investors. They want to drive out the unmarketable moderators and users. They want a unified, top-down Reddit to feed information to consumers. No discord, no discussion, no possibility to have a controversial thread or topic accidentally associated with your brand. Total consumption.

The ads currently target people who eat at Taco Bell and worship Jesus (yes, one ad was really trying to get me to subscribe to a service that teaches me the "real" type of love that Jesus preached). This is the 100 billion dollar valuation Reddit that will exist in five years, and it will be successful.

And honestly, fuck /u/spez, but we would all let our personal Reddits die if it meant billionaire status and guaranteed generational wealth for our progeny for the next quarter of a millennium.