Oh absolutely, I think that is already happening, but it hasn't reached broad public awareness yet. Reddit has 20 years of momentum, it won't stop all at once.

I suspect the company is aware that user engagement is dropping, along with the quality of new content. Typical of most corporations, their response is to play defensive, to try to maximize the value of what they already have, to scratch and claw and squeeze every drop from the existing data and userbase. This will accelerate the decline, obviously, but when a company is in this state they consider any strategy besides protectionism to be too high a risk.

They will ruin themselves with cowardice, to be sure, but they're still coasting on momentum for the moment. They will continue making the same types of decisions, at an accelerating pace, as the desperation sets in.

It doesn't need new blood. It needs infinite bots creating infinite content with no way to prove whether or not they're bots or humans.

Wouldn't you know it they've got it covered.