The users have nothing to lose. Worst case Huffman and his owners go ahead with smashing and burning the 3rd party moderation and commenting infrastructure - they would have done that even without protests. Would Huffman ban the people who contribute and moderate the discussions and police spam for free, and hire paid mods instead? A week ago I'd have said that not even he is that boneheaded...
Reddit users have Reddit to lose. A site that gives them hours of entertainment, allows them to access support groups, find out tips and tricks, get advice, and much more. It'll cost tens of millions a month to host another. Who has that?
VCs will get their money one way or another. Either they get their way with this and monetise users who previously were not monetised. Or they make profit other ways.
> and burning the 3rd party moderation
This here shows how out of touch you are with the reality of things. Third party moderation tools are staying. They're beneficial to Reddit, of course they're going to keep giving them free access.
These smaller forums can’t compete with Reddit on the whole. Sure you have places like hbf forums, file sharing talk, etc which are better for that niche but when dealing with people wanting various communities in the same place there is no viable replacement.
This turns out to be much more of a mixed bag in reality. Many of the third party moderation tools are built into the third party mobile apps, which will not get free access.
In the AMA OP [0] they listed a few projects that will get free access, some moderation tools among it, but even just requiring registration for such tools will have a massive chilling effect on the existing and future ecosystem.
[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/145bram/addressing_...