this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Ultimately, not enough people had joined the protest, so it didn't have enough economical power.
The protest wouldn't have done squat. So long as the protest was finite, spez knew people would forget and move on.
Also he tested everything with kid gloves till recently, when they booted mods. He could have gone that route earlier if there were bigger protests.
The protest was mostly the mods blacking out their subs to bring attention to the issue, but most users didn't care, and never would have.
Spez is hell bent on that IPO, and nothing would have stopped that.
Ot wouldn't have mattered if every single person had joined the protest. The decision had already been made, nothing was going to change that
This, here. Reddit is going the way of Digg, but trying to be more savvy about it. THey don't care that the specific group that's leaving are the content creators because they intend to charge content creators (paid API) who expect to profit from the traffic. They don't care that it's lower quality content creators. They want the money both ways, and don't care what percent of their "high quality" traffic disappears for it.
Since they're bigger than digg, they still have some high quality traffic. There's never a 100% protest with something as big as reddit. It's win/win/win for them.
The way this was pitched internally was almost certainly "we will see a drop in pageviews, but those pageviews will finally be profitable."
It was quite clear that they primed the relevant stakeholders for some turbulence.