I think this is a pretty naïve viewpoint - just look at what the mods of e.g. /r/iama announced today.

On social network websites, the vast majority of people are only lurkers, a relatively few people commenting, even fewer people posting, and fewer people still who want to put in the effort to build up a community.

Reddit's soul sits in those handcrafted small communities, the big ones sure will stay around and be popular, but there's lots of other places where one can get 5 second cat videos, and memes.

This event eroded a lot of the remaining trust between moderators and the admins, and while that can feel like it's not relevant to normal users, over time this will cause fewer people to be interested in starting a community on Reddit.

Yes I agree. What some seem to be missing is that public forums are a cesspit by default. While often invisible, the work of community managers and moderators is essential to maintain spaces people actually want to spend time in. These free workers are in limited supply. Once they leave, sites fill up with unmoderated spam and junk.

I would estimate 90% of worthwhile content on Reddit is posted by power users. Most subreddits are only alive because a few power users take the time to compile and post content. Nobody cares about them, but people will care once their content is gone.

Power mods suck, but power users are the backbone of the site. I predict information quality and density will continue to decrease rapidly on Reddit until it becomes no different from Instagram.

(I’m not personally a power user, I’ve just been on Reddit for a while)

Sample size of one, but I suppose maybe I’m in that category of power users - given that I’d post 3-10 “effort posts” per day.

Apollo finally went dark yesterday, I deleted it, and haven’t felt a single compulsion to check the mobile Reddit site. About the only Reddit related thing on my mind is whether I’m petulant enough to mass overwrite my posts - I’m only too familiar with the struggle of searching for something and finding dead blogs and forums a few years back.

I don’t think Reddit the company owes me anything, but I wonder how many other “high value” users (in terms of both content and value to marketers) simply drifted away once the iOS apps went dark.