In a comment shared by r/Apple moderator @aaronp613, Reddit cited its Moderator Code of Conduct and said that it has a duty to keep communities “relied upon by thousands or even millions of users” operational. Mods who do not agree to reopen subreddits that have gone private will be removed.
If a moderator team unanimously decides to stop moderating, we will invite new, active moderators to keep these spaces open and accessible to users. If there is no consensus, but at least one mod wants to keep the community going, we will respect their decisions and remove those who no longer want to moderate from the mod team.
I do think you’re being a tad optimistic – many users of subs like /r/memes will probably keep chugging along and accept their reddit overlords indefinitely. But as long as enough power users leave such that the content feels noticably worse, I think reddit will still feel the hurt
Sure, but meme enthusiasts will go where the memes are. They’re not all on reddit anymore, and reddit isn’t even a good source for spicy content at all. They’ll go to reddit, right after they get done checking their pleroma feed or a discord channel. Eventually the engagement on their recycled gold will be so bad they won’t even bother anymore.