They are biting the hand that feeds them, and if the community decides to leave Reddit has no value proposition anymore. They think they are the community, but they are just where the community lives for now.
Reddit is dead to me, too. This is beyond sad.
Digg and Tumblr?
I don't think everyone leaves en masse but I do expect a pretty big impact already, and considering they're attempting to IPO I doubt any of this is a good look.
Force communities back open, how? I've read countless comments over the past few days about how Reddit can just reopen all the privated subreddits with new moderators, without explaining where those new moderators were going to come from.
Curating and maintaining a community takes a LOT of effort, and I'm not convinced it's that easy to find people willing to do it for free. Just think about open source projects and how many have died when the sole maintainer called it quits.
The people who post all the links, all the pictures, all the text posts, all the most valuable comments (as opposed to the drive-by meme comments), these are the people most pissed off at Reddit. When Reddit loses them they will have nothing left.
All those lurker eyeballs they want to monetize will leave because they have nothing to look at.
Fuck 'em.
The real question will be if that new management is up to the task, and somehow, I feel like trying to scrape together a new mod team for thousands of subreddits on short notice is not going to work out like they had hoped.