It's just the same cycle over and over. As time has demonstrated dozens of times, HN isn't good at forecasting nor is representative at all of most end-users. The great majority of Reddit users (and this doesn't include me) use the official app or the official website and therefore besides this very short protest which will end soon as like many other protests in the past for different reasons, Reddit will just continue to be as popular.
As time has demonstrated dozens of times, platforms, behaviors and manias come an go in regular (though not quite predictable) bursts.
Betting that nothing ever changes is not consistent with the general arc of developments in the broader technology space.
Actually the opposite is likely true. The digital landscape is very "disruptable" and relies on various dark patterns (oligopolies, user illiteracy) to lock-in some "stability".
The individual events you mention are not the flood, they are the thunder indicating a thunderstorm is brewing.
I'm not saying things don't change because it'd be dumb to believe that given known human history. However I just despise the fact that even here in HN, any event happening in corporate that's otherwise minor outside of these doors is confidently defined as the tipping point ("fastest suicide" is maybe one of the most dramatic ways) and the company will go bust. Just wanted to clarify that, I agree with your sentiment.
The other major difference is content. On WA you only care about the content your direct friends/family create, on Reddit the masses are dependent on a few to submit comment (and even comment, there are a ton of lurkers who never comment, might not even up/down vote). If WA content goes to shit you can tell your BIL to stop sending you crap, if Reddit content goes to shit (due to loss of power users or moderation) it's a much harder problem to solve.
The WA exodus always struck me as way too difficult, getting friends/family to switch messaging platforms is super hard. Reddit? Might be unlikely but I was in the Digg->Reddit migration and I'm 100% looking for where I want to move now that Reddit is acting this way.
See the other Reddit post (one about Reddit punting mods if they act against the interests of Reddit itself, which has always been true it's worth noting) with 100s of comments, folded into pages and pages of continuations.
I mean does anyone honestly seriously believe Reddit purposefully undeleted this guy's comments? Reddit suspends accounts en mass, and when they do they nuke their entire history of comments on the site [I have been corrected, though I've strangely seen accounts get removed and all of their comments disappear too, though maybe they're running a script]. Reddit just really doesn't care about this guy's comments as much as he thinks they do.
That's not quite true, if an account is permanently suspended, the user page is unavailable for viewing, but the comments still remain in their respective threads.
It's only if an account is shadowbanned site-wide that all the comments are automatically removed too. This is intended only for spammer accounts, but can hit genuine users who are both newly created and end up being downvoted below a certain threshold.
Ask me how I know
It seems unlikely that their comments specifically were targeted, but it seems entirely plausible that a site-wide restoration took place that included their comments.
It also could be a bug.
While that would be nice, I doubt it. The quality of content might suffer and smaller subreddits will finally be where large ones have been for a long time, but for the vast majority of users who doomscroll and share memes, nothing much will change and reddit will continue.
this might be true, but this content is not what made reddit valuable
as with twitter, the fundamental question is: where do the large numbers of contributors of quality information / discussion (a small fraction of billions is still a huge number) go for a sane, long-term sustainable online platform that will not turn into the next Library of Alexandria
I don't think I will be returning to reddit. Just deleted a decade and thousands of comments. There are clearly many other ways to build online communities and I think a lot of people are more motivated than ever to develop those alternatives now. Eventually one of those alternatives will possibly kill reddit but I don't think the current exodus and subreddit protests will.
Twitter and Facebook still seem to be doing okay.
The cycle continues.