Was there even a mass exodus? I largely avoid Reddit now, but I do kind of doubt that they've been hurt in any meaningful way by all the protests and people leaving...
This didn't happen quickly with Digg either. This won't be as substantially decimating to the platform as the Digg exodus was, because reddit is WAY bigger than Digg was.
I'd say it took me about 3-4 years to fully migrate away from Digg to reddit, and that process was very similar to today, where there were a ton of platforms gaining steam (even while it was pretty clear that reddit was where the party went).
I think reddit's quality of content will deteriorate over time, and the moderation will suffer. It is going to die a death of 1000 paper cuts. The API change was just reddit saying "Hey, come stab us with your paper knives!"
idk. Reddit in 15 years will probably look a lot like newspapers do today. Kind of a joke, but somehow still standing.