I would have agreed with you if it had just been the API changes, but the recent behaviour from admins is extremely alienating. All they needed to do to fix this situation is strike a deal with app developers and say sorry. The protest would have been over in a day and things would have largely gone back to normal.

Instead, they dug in their heels and behaved like insecure little tyrants. They lie, they force mods out of their subs, they undelete comments, etc. There's no trust left between admins and community, and in the long run that's going to kill the website.

The thing that makes reddit great is the user created content. That content is provided by a tiny minority, while the vast majority just consumes.

Most of the people creating the content care about the platform, and they will leave if they are alienated enough. That's not even mentioning the thousands of hours of unpaid mod work. You might find some power-hungry replacements for the bigger subs, but the quality of mods will decrease, which will make the community worse in the long run.

If they continue on this path, reddit will end up like 9gag. There'll be content, but very little of it will be original, and it won't be all that interesting for targeted advertising like it currently is.

It won't disappear, but it certainly won't be a multi-billion dollar company.