Firstly I'd like to say kudos! to the mods of this subreddit for doing it so well and to everyone in this thread for a surprisingly informative and sane discussion overall.
I'd like to put out a few thoughts about why I feel that this incident will blow over and things will return to business as usual shortly. I can say that I have (in one form or another :) ) been active in online user forums since 1982 (not a typo) and have a great deal of experience in participating, setting them up and an understanding of some of the group dynamics involved from decades of experience.
Some of the things I am going to say are not at all complimentary to the user base here so I hope that you won't vote me down for that and remember that I am talking about the user base in general - not about you. OK, let's get started....
"Waaaatttt?" you say? Oh yes, you see it has been done many times before and it has failed before. Reddit is a free form discussion forum without any business plan for monitization". And that's been done before. Remember Deja News? Of course you don't but some time in the late 80's / early 90's some guys got together and made a *fantastic archive of Usenet (remember that? riiiight...) with a pretty good interface that allowed you to post to it as well eventually. In the 90's Deja News was one of the most widely read sites on the internet.
Deja News was SO good that a young company called Google bought it out, added it to their repertoire and after a few grumpies people started using it. It is now called Google Groups and it is dead Jim. None of you here uses it. no one uses it. Google hardly supports it at all and will likely drop it soon enough.
The problem with Deja News, Google Groups and Reddit is that no one monitized it from the start so there was no cash or impetus available to make it better. Usenet and Groups are as dead as Reddit will be in 4-7 years.
2. The Reddit user base is a bad target audience to market
A 2011 Reddit study stydy shows that 80% of the Reddit demographic is in the 18-30 age base and it is 2/3rd male. No girls :( Any marketing person worth his salt wants to market to woman at least as much as men because they usually are the primarily household consumers.
The study also shows that 56% of Reddits user base is in the under 18 to 24 age range. That's high school to college age and neither demographic has huge purchasing power or is a highly desirable one to market to . Study also says only 20% married and less than 50% employed and under 50% college graduates- also undesirable from a marketing perspective.
So even if Reddit does figure out a way to monitize the site effectively then who will it market the user base to?
Reddit is a dead man walking.
3.All this has happened before
And quite recently too. Let's look at how the recent Reddit revolt has affected reddit page views. Looking at the traffic stats (look at traffic by day) we see that by July 4th Reddit traffic was essentially the same as before No change at all really. Nada. Just as all the other Reddit scandals, this is looking to blow over in a week's time. Business as usual and the admins and owners know this
4. Reddit users are unskilled and ineffective at organizing an effective protest
Look at the front page, what do you see ? 100,000 signatures on a change.org petition (biggest and most ineffective joke in the world). 100K signatures on a useless piece of internet text while Reddit gets over 5 million unique page views a day. (the traffic stats link above). If I haven't been sarcastic enough about this then this means that roughly 2% of Reddit's daily user base just signed an internet petition that no one in power really cares about anyway. We did it Reddit.
What would have worked? Someone could have looked up Reddit's recent investors and emailed them. I guarantee you that 100K emails to Jared Leto and Snoop Dogg asking them to pull funding would have had an impact. But that was never going to happen because emails are haaaard and change.org is easy. I saw a fantastic list somewhere from someone who listed Reddit's main advertisers - great idea (!!) - except that went nowhere for the very same reasons.
A low educated, low-income, high-school to college, unmarried user base is not going to be able to organize an effective boycott. They just aren't invested enough in the product (or anything) else really to care. But , you know, they'll take 30 seconds to sign a change.org petition - well 2% of them will anyway.
I could talk about the "power mod" problem but I've said enough already. All the above issues could have been fixed but frankly it's too late now - much too late.
It's happened before. It's going to happen again