RDR2 suffers heavily from the same problem as GTAV’s single player mode: it’s a movie posing as a video game and both aspects suffer for it.
RDR2 would have been great if it was just the part where you wander around tracking critters and collecting flowers and playing cowboy dress-up, but the game really doesn’t want you to do that. Not to belabor the point, but between how unpredictable the connection between “interact with item/character X” and “start mission with character Y” can be and the game’s tendency to fail missions the second you go off-script, RDR2 often felt like it was directed by someone who actively resented the concept of player agency.
Based on the reporting two things seem clear to me: (1) the commercial value of Reddit is fundamentally a question of selling data access; and (2) the major subreddits will be made to continue operations come Hell or high water.
When (not if) Reddit circumvents the blackout by force, the obvious next move is to poison the well—make the data worthless by drowning it in noise (AI-generated, if you’ve a flair for the poetic). I doubt that will happen since (a) it would require coordination among a substantially larger and more dispersed userbase than the moderators and (b) it’s something of a nuclear option, but it’s an interesting idea.