That one is what I thought of too. But I wonder what extra issues it would cause. If they are profiting off people uploading things that they don’t have the rights to (which I would imagine is still most of it), then it seems like it would be easier to go after reddit itself. Though I am only guessing and don’t know actual laws. The other issue is that porn is the thing that main stream sites that like to act like they are “clean” go after first. Which would mean a possible second mass exodus of users/traffic. Just like Verizon found out real fast when they tried to “clean up” Tumblr. Though I would guess reddit does have enough non-NSFW users and content to weather it much better.

Being fully transparent, I really only ever spend time on reddit when looking for such content since it is much safer from malware ads and fake links. Also better categorized for really specific interests with 4chan levels of daily users posting. Aside from that, I imagine that I will also be impacted by so many old threads that happen to have randomly crucial answers to very specific tech or misc (non-NSFW) problems I am dealing with. It is already very frustrating to get hit with their “You look sus and IP will be banned unless you sign in” warning screen if I happen to be not signed in and having all the ad/tracking blocking extensions and a VPN turned on.

I login to lemmy often enough that I would notice. Lemmy grew a lot overnight the last time reddit pissed off a lot of their userbase with one decision. There’s good and bad to that, it was nice to see this place grow, but it became much less friendly when redditors flocked here. I’d expect more of that.

Nah. That was the classical period of the internet with great leaps in learning and creativity. Now it is the middle ages where capitalism/feudalism wrecked all sense of community.