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?
I’m not sure what people expected to happen. The protests did what they needed to do: they seeded the threadiverse with enough users for a general feed.
Reddit is not going to advertise its internal struggles. We’ve already seen they can’t follow through with their threat to replace moderators when they shutdown “TIHI”. Last I checked 3/6 subreddits with 30+ million subs were in some kind of locked or troll state. Another sub mentioned they’ve had to turn off comments because they dont have the tools to address the 200k+ submissions of backlogged flagged content.