This is so stupid. It is possible (but certainly not assured) that a coalition of Coinbase and some other big exchanges could apply enough economic pressure to force through a hardfork vis-à-vis the economic majority, but:

- If they fail, it will massively damage them.
- If they succeed, it will massively damage Bitcoin. A large percentage of users will refuse to switch, so they've automatically reduced the size of the Bitcoin economy -- both the price and their number of customers will go down. And BIP 101 itself is basically suicidal.

abusive voting patterns were stifling the block size debate leading up to the release of the non-consensus code. This had created an illusion of popular support by the time XT was released and the new subreddit policy was enacted in response. I didn't notice any decrease in vote abuse at that point. I'd say the problem only got worse after the XT sub was created and 'everybody left'. This is because they didn't leave since nobody followed them like they expected, and XT adoption flopped hard. So now we're stuck with maybe 500 people who don't want to be here, but don't have the support they thought they did as evidenced by metrics across the board.  They're bitter, angry, loud and just hang around and ruin the experience of other readers who don't share their views, but aren't willing to stick their head out for fear of getting sniped.