The admins have shown that they are not going to flinch so easily. If mods shut down subreddits then the admins are simply going to reassign the subreddits to more compliant mods and reopen them, and Reddit will resume operation. To casual Redditors, it will appear that the site is 'back to normal' and the interruption to their endless-scrolling-dopamine-hit is over.

The r/pics and r/gifs mods see that this is going to be a long game, so they've gone for malicious compliance. The message of dissent will continue WITHIN Reddit's walls, and the awareness campaign will continue.

The final battle will begin at the end of this month when the API is restricted and 3rd-party apps stop working. The awareness campaign will drastically redirect the casual Redditors ' anger/outrage that their favorite app no longer works from the apps' creator ("my stupid Apollo app stopped working") directly to spez.

It appears that spez thinks that Redditors will smoothly switch to the official reddit app... but I think that he drastically underestimates how resistant people are to change of any kind. It will be interesting to watch things unravel. Hopefully, this will be epic, but I suspect that it'll be more game-of-thrones.