I think the comparisons to TikTok are quite apt, and I think there's a further conclusion that is missing from this essay. Long term /u/spez wants to get rid of subreddits, but he needs to do it in a boiling-the-frog kind of way, otherwise the community would revolt even further.

But it's the right way to go from his perspective. In retrospect subreddits were a mistake, allowing individual communities to form in isolation, requiring mods who understood the nuances of each of those communities.

/u/spez wants to figure out how to kill subreddits without actually killing them. My guess is that subreddits will transition over to a hashtag concept. At first, posts will only be allowed to have one hashtag (so it maps to how reddit works today), eventually they will have many. This will kill sub moderation.

All that's left is killing old.reddit.com, he can do that by just gimping the thing and breaking it. Nothing explicitly malicious but just stop putting engineering effort into it and eventually it falls apart. This makes sure all users use "new reddit".

In the new client you won't be able to view subreddits - you will have tag search but it will never be as feature rich as just scrolling the home page.

I have no idea if reddit can compete with tiktok but at this point that's where they'll be. Maybe they hitch on to the "tiktok is stealing your data" wagon and brand themselves as the American Tiktok that is Lawful and Is Not Evil, which can probably get them decently far.