I was a witness to OPs great secret.

Red Sonja, destroyer of pallets, ruler of strange food combinations, punisher of pizza culture on a global scale. All hail thee! :-)

You sir, are an absolute barbarian!

Reddit is absolutely, 100% certainly not going to step back on these change. They’ve made up their mind long ago.

But just for the hypothetical: I think they lost a LOT of trust with the two most essential parts of the community - users and mods. Also the company (or rather, its CEO) may have taken significant image damage due to the “AMA” spez did.

I think business will go on as usual, but the decline will be more and more noticable over time. It will go the way of Digg. Unless of course reddit decides to hire moderation themselves. But we all know they probably wont want do do that. The course seems set to selling the data they have already accumulated.