I'm not suggesting at all that Reddit as we know it would survive the transformation, rather that Reddit management probably has reasons to think that the transformation is worth the fallout. At this point, I think their "ideal user" is basically the opposite of people who cut their teeth on classic Reddit: the person who doesn't use ad blockers, scrolls the default subs for hours, rarely posts problematic content, and never gets angry at the admins.

I would wager that 90% or more of their revenue comes from the generic TikTok meme slurry of r/all and the front page. I think some big % of their users aren't even signed in.

So the long tail of hobby subs are probably just noise and operational burden. So if they're wanting to IPO, they probably want to cut costs and focus hard on ad revenue. I'm guessing banning nsfw stuff is probably in the works too.

Yep, their API won't be serving NSFW content anymore.

Depending on how they implement that change, that is going to mess with a lot of spam control bots.

that seems going too far from me, they would be killing their strongest positives (easy to access communities for niches) just to become tiktoks sewage outlet?