I remember when Reddit announced it would begin charging commercial developers for access to its API, and in response, thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. I think it lasted for a couple of weeks. The CEO threatened the Reddit mods that he would replace them if they didn’t reopen the subs, so nearly every mod reopened and everything went back to normal. The CEO won easily without offering anything, and he was right when he said that ‘this too shall pass.’ Those third-party apps offered accessibility features for disabled people that Reddit still hasn’t implemented today. Now Reddit is getting even worse. How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
I think most of this is spot on, but the hearsay was that the subreddits who did participate in the shutdown were threatened with an ultimatum, which while I don’t think is possible to prove either way, hints that it would have happened regardless. Tho I’m usually all-too-ready to don my tinfoil hat when it comes to reddit trying to look appealing to investors; I witnessed a number of hentai/porn subreddits get banned and users actively request to become new mods only to be ignored.
Even if you discount the mods, there’s definitely a certain inertia you see in groups like this (like what’s going on with Discord right now) – people don’t want to leave in part because they’ve got their little in-group and don’t want to have to go through finding or founding a new group elsewhere. I think it’s particularly prevalent with those niche communities that don’t ever really break containment; the community would already be small enough without fracturing to the eight winds. I’m liking Lemmy so far but as I am trying to drum up activity in one of those niche communities (RWBY), it’s kind of disheartening how little relative traffic there is across the place.