Internet Archive is not Library Genesis, the two organizations have very different functions and should be structured very differently.
Internet Archive is for preserving data, not necessarily distributing it as widely as possible. If distributing the data puts the preservation of that data at risk then don't distribute it, keep it stashed safely away. Maybe a decade or two from now things will change and they'll have the only copies, and keeping them snugly away out of sight will have been vital to preserving them after that point. Internet Archive has a public corporate presence that makes it easy to donate to and easy to run their servers, but also makes them easy to sue. So avoid doing anything that gets you sued.
Library Genesis, on the other hand, is piracy central. Their mandate is distributing this stuff and sticking their thumbs in the eyes of the publishers. So they're structured entirely differently. They run on the shady side of the internet, making them hard to donate to but also hard to sue. They should be the ones "fighting the fight" right now. It would be sad if they got taken down but not an irrecoverable tragedy, a new Library Genesis can rise again.
Internet Archive are being idiots by poking the bear like they have been lately, it's like they're carrying a precious irreplaceable baby and they've decided to take a run through a minefield. I hope they learn from this debacle.
PayPal is not decentralized. None of the "more standard" payment platforms are. If you want to have some kind of cross-instance limitation on things like awards and not have instances be able to just spew them out willy-nilly if they want to then you're going to need some kind of decentralized ledger to track them authoritatively, and that's basically cryptocurrency in a nutshell. This is what cryptocurrency is for.
Generally speaking the solution to these sorts of things when one doesn't want it is "then don't use it." That's especially true in a federated, decentralized system like this.
And I'm pointing out how this "most plausible scenario" ends in ruin for Reddit. If Reddit's most popular subs are being run by people whose literally only qualification for the role is that they are power hungry, what kind of subreddit will those end up being? The mods won't be doing anything to cultivate the quality of the place, they likely won't even know what "quality" is. They'll just come up with a bunch of rules to enforce, throwing their weight around pointlessly and alienating anyone who sticks around long enough to interact with them. They probably won't even be good "janitor" moderators because proper janitoring is a lot of hard work that doesn't necessarily result in you receiving the sort of adulation that a power-hungry person would actually crave. Why spend hours dealing with meaningless spam that only bots will see you blocking when you get more of a thrill from bossing around people who slipped up on some technicality or rule that you implemented primarily so that people would slip up on them?
And if the admins try ordering you to do the spam-patrol grunt work with the threat of kicking you out, well, you don't actually care. They're not paying you and you have no interest in the community itself. Rinse and repeat.
Replace the mods with who? Reddit doesn't have an endless supply of compliant free labor they can just assign willy-nilly to whatever subs they desire. Especially now that the masks are off about what Reddit admins really think about moderators.
Actually, that sounds like exactly what I would be advising them to do in a situation like this. Reddit has been bloating itself with new features that nobody has been asking for because it keeps trying to turn itself into Facebook or Discord or whatever. If Reddit needs to become profitable I'd suggest cutting those and focusing entirely on what Reddit already does better than its competitors. Link aggregation and threaded discussion. Do just that, but do it better. That would allow them to shed some massive expenses both in technology and in staffing without impacting the income from its core business.
They didn't do that and it's probably too late now. I don't know how Reddit would be able to shed its Imgur-like image and video hosting at this point, for example.
Yeah, it wasn't a bad place. I'm sure a lot of people would expect it to be full of threads about how century club members were better than the low-karma plebs or discussing tips on how to farm more karma or something, and it was nothing like that. I mainly recall it being a place where people would share tragedies in their lives and commiserate on them, knowing that they had a relatively "private" place to be discussing that sort of thing with people they considered "peers." I just didn't find it to be compelling discussion most of the time.
I joined the Century Club and it was just kind of boring. I rarely ever saw a thread I felt compelled to comment on. I suspect it's because there really wasn't much of a common interest behind it. Didn't know about the 10-year club but I suspect it would be similar, perhaps with more of a "aren't kids these days awful" vibe.
There are datahoarders out there who have complete copies (at least as complete as physically possible) of every post and comment ever put on Reddit, I've seen torrents of them. They're multiple terabytes, though, so I didn't keep a copy of the link - I'd never download something that big.
They will be preserved, and perhaps someday live again on some piratical website or in the memory of some shady AI.