The interesting wrinkle is not necessarily about “the majority of users” caring. It’s whether the content creators and moderators care to the point that the people bailing on reddit are drawn largely from the people who actually produce value.
If 80% of reddit users just browse or post one liners and 20% are the mods and users who generate the content and keep communities from going off the rails, that would be roughly in line with what we’d expect in an online community. If the people bailing out are mostly coming from that 20%, then post and community quality will decrease, which will eventually decrease users and other KPIs. That was the point of the blackputs and demoderation protests. I deleted all of my posts on all of my accounts before leaving for that reason.
The 80% might not care about the abstract, but when content falls off, they’ll find another site. It’s like Reddit: The Muskening