It can go one of a few ways.
-
Apart from the few subs that remain offline, it'll basically be back to normal. Those that do remain offline indefinitely just get forcibly reopened or recreated by admins, especially huge subreddits like /r/videos. Smaller ones just get redicted to /r/topicnew or some other creative name.
-
A lot of subreddits and more importantly moderators and users leave the site permanently. In order for this to happen however, there'd have to be a consensus alternative, which there isn't ATM. Otherwise, these communities are pretty much lost forever unless the mods put a message to go to X alternative service in the "subreddit is private" banner. Tbh, I don't think people are gonna stomach losing years of their lives in an instant so they'll just re create subreddits unless the mods provide an alternative.
No matter what though, they're not backing down on the effective removal of the API (still leaving the sneaky clause "you can pay us if you want but it'll be a king's ransom" for AI, even though they can just trawl the web manually lol). They'll probably announce some crappy customization features to hoodwink those who don't know what an API is and lie to them and say it's "API v2" or whatever.
I just honestly don't know how it's going to shake out and I'm scared im going to lose these communities. I don't give a single solitary fuck about Reddit the company anymore, and I never did really. I just hope all of the subreddits find a new home and don't just shrug their shoulders and say "welp, guess that's it guys".
I'm curious how Digg's bottom-line ended up. Reddit thinks they're too big to fail, and maybe that's true. But Twitter's too big to fail, and just keeps "succeeding with less money".
With Digg, it was all about APIs as well. People don't remember that. There's a reason the big fights are over APIs. And it's not just about money (I'd pay for gold to use a third party client with no ads, maybe even more). Reddit's not just looking to monetize third-party-app users, they're trying to change the entire face of reddit to be more vendor-focused and less redditor-focused. It might not look dramatically different on 7/1 (or it might; Digg changed pretty quick). Reddit keeps talking about how much AI uses the APIs, but I think they really mean "how much we want to sell the APIs for AI". Maybe that's better than Digg because maybe we (the product) don't feel it as obviously.
But let's be honest, the next step regardless of whether reddit becomes a Copilot source feed, is that the same AI is hooked up to the APIs to create content and monetize reddit even more for companies.
It's not about the third party tools being killed by this, it's about all the clients they think they can get to pay these new prices.