I suspect it's too late to stop much of the madness. Reddit took $1.4 billion in VC money, and like mobsters, VCs like to get paid back without much regard to how it happens. Even if the Reddit workers unionized, I suspect that Reddit's execs would happily fire every union member rather than significantly jeopardize their IPO. After all, Twitter shows how you can fire the great bulk of your staff, treat the remainder horribly, and still have a content site limp along for quite a while without immediately dying.