I‘m not sure if I‘m missing something, but I‘d be really surprised if Volition was doing fine. Agents of Mayhem didn‘t do well at all and the Saints Row reboot was pretty terrible. Their last somewhat successful launch was probably the Saints Row 4 expansion back in 2015.
It‘s always sad to see a developer shut down, especially one with such history. But I can honestly understand closing a studio which hasn‘t had any great release for over eight years.
I would honestly love to see that. It would make their situation so much worse. They rely on people moderating subs voluntarily. They don’t have the manpower to do it themselves. The subs would probably get flooded with spam and NSFW content. And if there’s one thing advertisers hate more than the current blackout, it’s their ads being displayed between questionable porn.
So if reddit really did this, I wouldn’t count it as a loss for the protesters. Instead, I would go get some popcorn.
I‘ve been using Kagi since September as well and I can only recommend giving it a try.
Being able to personalize search rankings is something I definitely wouldn‘t want to miss anymore.
One thing I’d like to mention is that they‘re also really great at listening to feedback. For example, they recently added an indicator for potentially paywalled sites to the search results, because users have suggested it.