What's the end game here for reddit? There's no way this would end well.
What do you mean? How can this end poorly? Most people browsing Reddit are addicted with no viable substitutes. Breaking their addiction through continued blackouts would end badly. Replacing some mods no user cares about will hardly have an impact. Lets be realistic.
Or one where you've pissed off a decent portion of your userbase, encouraging them to be on the lookout for alternatives to move to?
Reddit could be like, say, Valve, universally liked (or at least, not disliked), making it virtually impossible even with gargantuan effort to take market share.
Or they can be like Digg, their predecessor, or any other number of dead services over time who kept turning the screws on their users and found out there is indeed a point at which it is too much.
(interesting article along these lines: https://every.to/p/breaching-the-trust-thermocline-is-the-bi...)