It is so frustrating seeing how people received the protest.
“it’s not working” “Reddit doesn’t care” “they can do whatever they want”.
Well yeah, if that’s the attitude!
How do people not see that the protest disrupted the entirity of Reddit? Just about every weekly active user felt it.
How do they not understand the impact on revenue (especially ads), and how Reddit cannot feasibly sustain it, and were banking on the idea that it’ll eventually die down?
The fact of the matter is, if Reddit became worried that the protest will continue in strength indefinitely, they would be forced to roll back. The loss impact would greatly outweigh whatever measly profits they make from this API change that no one will buy.
Yes, this was a lot more for Reddit than just profits. If Reddit had backed down, it would have impact much greater than just third party apps. It remind people once again that users hold the power when they’re United. They can decide how to run their communities. But Reddit just could not afford this to happen, which is why they fought to convince you that the protest isn’t working and you should back down. And unfortunately many of us did…
It’s insane. People have forgotten protests actually do work. It’s not easy, but it very often get results.
What doesn’t give results however, is doing nothing.
I think that this is also partially due to the fact that the protest was framed within pure technical issues. The problem was “the 3rd party apps, or the API, or whatever”. This perfectly matches with the narrative that technology and ideology have nothing to do with each other, and the result is that you get people who just react “well, I don’t use apps, who cares”, when really the problem is that a central company that makes money on you and other users can unilaterally take any decisions they want, even if it’s against your interests, and you have absolutely no saying, because you are alone, vendor locked and addicted. All of these are the precise results of the way that platform (and all other major platforms) are built.
If you started talking about this, on the other hand you get the " ah, so you are protesting because of ideology ", which apparently became a bad word.
I would have liked (and I tried to do so myself) to see the current technical changes framed in a bigger context (such as building a better cyberspace), to explain that this is not fixed by simply reducing the API calls, or including NSFW content, but requires deeper changes. By merging the technical side and the ideological side, I think it would have been a little harder for people to have this completely individualistic stance such as " oh, I use the official app, so don’t care".
This is what so many people never get.
Today: They are changing something that you don’t care about.
If you let them do that, then tomorrow: They’ll start changing a bunch of stuff you DO care about.