The Post, for instance, is the second-most popular news outlet on Reddit, which makes it a pretty good bellwether for how other media outlets would be affected by changes to the site. But these places receive the vast majority of their Web traffic from somewhere else, explained Liam Corcoran, the head of communications for the social analytics firm NewsWhip, and Reddit 'spikes' are so capricious that they don't count or plan on them. Reddit's aggregate effect on most other sites is minimal: It refers millions of readers to YouTube, Wikipedia and Twitter, the data suggests, as well as to the Guardian, The Washington Post, the New York Times and a long string of other legacy news outlets. 'We get millions of social traffic visits a month.' 'You would be surprised,' Pornhub's vice president said in a telling Reddit AMA. The site is composed of a system of smaller, interest-based forums, called subreddits users submit links and text posts to these forums, then vote them up or down to determine placement. On one hand, it's an aggregator of news, ephemera and information: a viral meritocracy through which the best stuff on the Web wends its way up and out. To understand what the internet would look like without Reddit, you first have to understand what Reddit does for the internet now. If Reddit suddenly disappeared off the internet, it would change the internet. The question is: How would the internet change? And what, just as pressingly, does it stand to lose? 'If Reddit suddenly disappeared off the internet, it would change the internet,' decreed Jeffrey Eberhard, one of the site's most popular users.

But in the wake of Reddit's latest and most traumatic bout of internal drama, several pundits have found themselves pondering the hypothetical worst case: one in which the tensions between Reddit's leadership and its user base topple the site, entirely.

To be clear, no one actually expects the internet's 'front page,' and its 35th most popular website, to shut down - not now, anyway. Reddit is in meltdown as controversial CEO Ellen Pao faces revolt.

Adult sites like reddit