@Meanlucario
What poneless said.
Competition for users means that users will be prioritized more, rather than being seen as an exploitable resource to screw with according to the whims of the mods. It means that the trend towards more and more censorship will be broken, because people will want access to everything, as opposed to only the “safe and pure” pre-approved images. If people wanted that, they’d go to SFW-only Bronibooru.
Site features and rules are also going to be more variable. It’s more likely that we’ll be able to find a ruleset that works for us specifically, rather than have to deal with rules we dislike. That means that there will be places that return back to that “if you don’t want to see it, then use the damned filters” mentality that used to be the rule here.
It also means that the gradual decay of the quality of modding decisions and the formation of insular cliques will be undone. Starting from scratch with new staff and a new userbase, but while still remembering the lessons learned from the failure of Derpibooru’s administration means that future boorus should be better equipped to avoid this same fate.
There’s also karma. The administration is clearly mainly doing this to appease the twitter mob. Once this is done, many users and artists will leave (many have already left). With the “wrongthinkers” successfully purged, for the most part, they’ll turn to the twitter mob and ask if they’re happy. The mob will not be happy. They can never be happy. They never had any interest in using this site in the first place, so they’ll vanish right after this immediate mess is done. They were permanently enraged from the second the site tried to do anything other than immediately jump to fulfill their demands. Even holding a poll to decide how much they wanted to change the existing rules was too much of a concession as far as they were concerned.
This is a lesson in why going out of your way to antagonize your own audience to appeal to people who are not your audience is a bad idea. There are many lessons like it over the past few years. They can be summed up as “get woke, go broke”. Given the inertia of Derpibooru, that won’t happen immediately, but I believe the fatal damage has been done. It’s just a matter of waiting for the site to bleed out.
I see a ton of upsides, and very few downsides.
