You can be right and have a good idea, but you cannot make someone listen or believe in your way of thinking.
Reddit, being a private company, always meant they were going to do what they wanted, regardless of how the moderators cried foul. They had made up their minds before they informed the user base, and they were going to double-down no matter if people liked it or not.
I suspect, they believed most people used the main website (new or old) and the default app. I suspect their analytic data may even have suggested that fact. The mods who spoke out, may have not done so alone, but Reddit was committed, and I suspect they believe they will recover in due time.
The only solution was not so much to protest, but to leave. Those of us who joined either Kbin or Lenny, and who choose not to come back, is what will speak volume. As a corporation, numbers are everything. Even unhappy people who visit will mean success, as it means ad revenue and justification in their eyes.
At the end of the day, that is what it will come down to… numbers. Do people leave Reddit and stay gone, or do curious minds lurk in the shadows and in time rejoin?
Reddit as a company has too much influence and control over the platform for the protests to work effectively on the ‘average user’. People have been conditioned over the past decade to accept all forms of exploitation for a small convenience.
I don’t think there will be a great migration that people are expecting, but it’s a good opportunity for others to start something new. I think the overall adoption will be similar to Mastodon, where it’s good enough but nowhere near representative of the Twitter engagement or userbase.