If the blackout does not continue I think spez will think he’s won. But I think the real pain will be when third party apps shut down. There will be a loss of users, but that won’t hurt too much. If moderators don’t want to use the official app or desktop site to moderate or decide to leave entirely then reddit could get out of hand. Just look at Twitter - with a relaxing of moderation there has been more trolls, spam, and hate. That type of change may lead to losing the more mainstream, casual user.
I don’t think it makes sense that the down arrow counts towards negative reputation but the up arrow does not count towards positive reputation. Either only have positive reputation linked to boosts or have negative and positive linked to the arrows on comments and threads.