Technology
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From https://www.redditinc.com/blog/https-www.redditinc.com-apifacts:
The 48 hour blackout that was popularized was a complete joke and reminds me of all the corporations that change their social media pictures to pride-themed photos for like 2 days then revert back to not caring at all. Reddit literally did not give two shits about 2 days of ad revenue being gone because they knew it would be back to normal before most people even noticed.
Once July 1st starts a lot of redditors will move to lemmy or other sites because of the third party apps no longer available. Corporate greed practices should die. Also I won't be surprise that reddit will add more bots in the comments.
Yeah, but I feel like Reddit has become the next Facebook. The young and techy crowd started using it first, and eventually boomers and non-techy people started using it. I would bet that the better majority of users don't care about any of the issues that are going on. They just want the content.
Now hopefully, the primary submitters of the content leave and Reddit's decline comes from a shitty userbase that doesn't actually contribute anything. But that's gonna take time.
Yes, tech-savy and high-literacy people are always the first to move when things go down the drain, I think those are the ones providing the most valuable content, the masses follow but that requires quite some time as you rightfully said.
It could even take longer for reddit masses to realize something has changed, if we consider reddit is full of reposting bots, there's so much content in there that they could go on for years before content "consumers" realize there's nothing worthy anymore.
Without an open API, there's no way to verify exactly how many "meatspace" users there are on reddit. This is a key piece of information to hold that, say, facebook has always held close to their chest.
Advertisers ultimately pay for "impressions", and that number can be ofuscated and inflated (ie counting bots) to entice advertisers and IPO investors to continue to invest.
Turning off the API is turning off active user verification.
I think the reported number was like ≈10% use third party apps.
The real question is how much of the best content came from those users, how many of them are moderators, and how many will leave. Bc those people will have an outsized impact on the website.