I heard that less than 10% of redditors use 3rd party apps. After tomorrow, I doubt that the whole 10% moves here. Maybe 5% if we are lucky (on unlucky if you are an instance owner).
What really matters is how well the mods can manage the site without their 3rd party tools. Without them, moderation will suffer.
The content on r/all was already dropping in quality during june. I was noticing I was getting into weird niche subreddit way earlier than usual, so hopefully that means all the post makers are starting to jump ship
There will probably be another wave. Simply for the fact that moderation bots are going to stop functioning tomorrow and Spam is just going to go through the roof. It all depends on how fast Reddit can get a handle on that situation.
Oh yeah, I'd forgotten about the moderation tools losing API access. The big subreddits don't have the staff to manually fight all of that, especially with at least some of the senior/dedicated mods losing at least some interest in keeping things afloat. Pro bono work was already rough enough with tools to help. Remove those tools and it's going to put a lot of people off moderating in a serious manner.
At what point do they just decide fuck it and stop trying to fight against all the spam and irrelevant posts because they simply just don’t have the means to anymore
Yeah I don't think there will be a significant drop in reddit users however I think they'll be a noticeable drop in quality posts and comments. I think with many older gen redditors and experienced mods jumping ship there's going to be somewhat of a void left in the wake.
That was very much how the death of Digg felt. As the real users left, they're upvoting and downvoting pressure that kept total trash off the front page waned. Soon it was nothing but total garbage posts and advertisers who were gaming the system. The content quality completely crashed and it just pushed more real users away.
It'll be interesting to watch how well Reddit weathers this and what comes out the other side. Digg still exists, but it's a shadow of a shadow of its former self.