This pretty much happened on 4chan with GamerGate and /pol/. Banning GamerGate discussion immediately drove a mass exodus away from the site, and persistently fucking with /pol/ pushed out many more. But 4chan didn't die. The overwhelming majority of 4chan users voted with their clicks that they would tolerate politically motivated censorship, datamining, and adverserial moderation for faster boards and a fatter meme pipeline.

Reddit is exactly the same. Keep pulling shit like this, and it will drive quality users away out of principle. But Zombie Reddit will keep lurching forward, spewing poorly compressed Facebook screencaps and cat gifs.