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.

The problem with this is that Reddit, unlike Netflix, is a social media thing.

And there are two very different ways of looking at the 'value' of social media systems.

The first, and most common, is simply stating that the value is based on how many people are using it. The more people use it, the more valuable it is, and so first mover advantage is almost impossible to overcome.

Except... That doesn't really match reality, social media companies die, or stop being nearly as popular. Even ones that used to be wildly popular.

The big key is that not all users are equally valuable. You want to be involved in a network with people that you find interesting. Even if you never even post, you want to view media that you find interesting.

For memes, you want to meme with other people who appreciate what you create, and who create vaguely similar works.

For conversations, you want to have them with people that have something that you find interesting to say.

On any metric which is just about 'how many users', the loss of third party clients, even if it causes the loss of every single user of those clients, is a very tiny drop in the bucket.

The problem is that many of these users are very likely to be important users. They are the people who give enough of a damn about their experience to go looking for a 'better' interface, and giving a damn sure looks to me like a good indicator of caring enough to contribute in a meaningful way.

Same deal on moderators, all of Reddit absolutely relies on moderators, unpaid moderators, and those are the people who both really give a damn, and who have been quite outspoken about absolutely needing better tooling than what Reddit natively provides.

If enough of those 'high value' users leave, the value of Reddit to almost everyone else drops through the floor.

It doesn't go to zero, but it does make it much more likely that other users, the ones that maybe don't post a lot, but who do view a lot, will follow them.

And those users are the ones that view a lot of ads, and thus fund the whole thing.

You simply don't get this effect with something like Netflix, because the value of Netflix is what movies and shows they have, not what other users they have.