The title is a bit clickbaity but the article is worth a read. To keep it short:
- large subreddits stopped protesting
- 1.8k subreddits are still in the dark, but those are rather small
- [from the article] “Though the Reddit team likely caused permanent damage to the platform and its relationship with users, Spez got his way. But that victory might not mean much.”
IMO it was a Pyrrhic victory. Sure, the protests ended, and most users are still stuck in that shithole… but the reputation damage won’t be reversed, Reddit managed to seed its competitors (as this one) with the necessary userbase to make them functional, and odds are that Reddit will keep going in its death spiral. And that doesn’t even take into account the amount of bad press that it generated, that will hurt IPO numbers for sure.
I was pretty much unsubscribed from or had blocked the major default subs long time ago, so while those subs got headlines and attention those that subscribed to the smaller ones may have seen not much difference. Lot of the subs I had been subscribed to functioned as normal under the explanation of we are too small to matter. And so my feed was mostly unimpacted.
The large subs have been the easiest to replace while the small ones which is what made reddit unique have been challenging. So reluctance of lot of those type of subs to do anything made it a loss from the start. Big subs setting the tone like nba and apple folding immediately afterwards didn’t help either to convince the ones that had joined to follow through.
It was lost couple days in, since lot of the mods never wanted or were willing to leave reddit begin with and showed that hand immediately.