Whenever anyone has been quiet for too long, I try to nudge them with "hey, if you've been speaking we can't hear you" - it's happened to me too many times already
Because Reddit is in the unique position where a small amount of users can affect a vast swathe of their platform - moderators.
Most mods don't care, by volume. The ones that do are often also the ones that are more active, more engaged, and more entwined with communities outside Reddit.
During the protest last year, polls come back favorably pretty much everywhere to shut down - but after the shutdown actually happened, a tidal wave of lurkers who never vote and never comment came out of the woodwork to complain and call it all stupid. Public opinion of all users is likely against practically any protest that could happen.
I don't like it, but that's how it is. The best realistic outcome is that a large contingent of content creators and more informed users leave the site - but how many of those are left that haven't already vamoosed and are still willing to leave under some unknown worse circumstance?
Let's be honest with ourselves - no, it won't be wildly unpopular. This change affects very few people and the people still using Reddit at this point likely won't care much, and I have doubt any future change would cause much outrage either.
Because think about this - who is actively complaining and gnashing their teeth about the continued downward spiral and still scrolling, posting, moderating there at this point? I'd love to believe more people would jump ship - but if it ever happened it would take a far larger-scope fuckup than anything we've seen so far.
There is a point where more users may bring more downsides than upsides - but we haven't reached that point yet. There are still many many niche communities that have no equivalent here and starting them would never take off with the current number of people.
People like to think that they've made some far-reaching change with what little actually happened. The painful truth is: they didn't. There wasn't a big hit to the userbase, most people on Reddit already hated moderators and didn't give a shit if they got removed, and overall people caved far too quickly (how many people folded instantly when their internet moderator position was threatened? (I say this as someone who was one of those moderators that flat out quit everything and nuked my account rather than continuing to toil for free for a corporation that hates me)).
The actually important thing that was accomplished by the protesting was platforms like Lemmy getting enough of a userbase boost to become stable - in the future, Lemmy and others may be able to act as viable alternatives to Reddit, because there's already a community here (however small). Reddit will continue to enshittify, and people will continue to leave in small numbers that may escalate to big numbers if they commit a truly massive fuckup. The more heavy Reddit users (read: more invested, not necessarily more active) are small in number compared to the vast majority who lurk, don't give a shit about any ongoing meta-drama, and don't particularly care about any changes to the UI or browsing experience as long as they can still get an endless feed of memes.
Even if it hurts to realize this, it's important to make sure people get this message beat into their skulls so that we aren't stuck with a bunch of Redditors (derogatory) with over-inflated egos that think Reddit will bend over backward to appease them, then cave as soon as they receive literally any pushback from the corporation running the site.
I am subscribed to over 100 channels, ranging from daily uploads to 1 video every few months. Frankly I don't need more stuff to watch. When I do want to find something new, it's either a recommendation from a friend, something I saw on a different social media, or something I searched for myself deliberately.
This change isn't a good thing, it's Google trying to pressure more people into giving up more data, but the "threat" of them removing their algorithmically recommended content from my feed is not a threat at all, it's a bonus if anything.
I don't need Lemmy to compete with or kill Reddit. All I wanted was any one platform to get enough of an influx of users to be self-sustaining even after the outrage started to die down, which appears to have been successful.
Garliclike