Something I’ve seen pointed out is that if Reddit ultimately does shift to a more “democratic” model of voting mods in and out, that could easily be abused by bot farms or for nefarious purposes. Everything about the future direction the site is heading sounds bleak and barely what it once was.
While I can’t see it dying in anytime soon in how many visitors it receives, the general “vibe” and communities of the site will differ I imagine and that’s what matters to me. The end of Apollo was it for me. Like you said, others can do whatever but I’ve left.
I agree, the Verge’s coverage has been much better on this subject. It isn’t about not paying for use, it’s about a reasonable price that isn’t so exorbitant to essentially bankrupt them and make them go away. Christian has addressed this point several times already.
Regardless of whether or not anything serious happens to Reddit, it’s just not the same for me anymore and I won’t be going back. I can see the vibe and audience further shifting ala Twitter. It’s too big to just fail, Digg, MySpace and other older sites still exist, they’re just shadows of themselves now.
As someone with family on the autism spectrum myself, I’ve found they’re usually fairly open to whatever the facts are whether that disproves them or not. There’s a lot of overlap at times between narcissistic traits and autism, are you sure he just wasn’t a narcissist? I say that because refusing to accept the rationalization of what may be a bad idea just sounds dumb. (The bumper stickers made stand out to me too).
Alternatively he was just someone with autism who is narcissistic and with an ego who refused to accept any new information that countered what he had settled on.