People discredit every type of protest, IRL or not. I think back to every major protest that’s happened in response to some major event, and the response every time is “That won’t ever work”, “You’re wasting your time”, “Imagine caring about that”.
This isn’t the death of Reddit, not even close to it. Reddit may even get more popular after this. However, that doesn’t mean all of this was pointless.
The Fediverse continues to grow, and that’s genuinely a good thing. Every time a platform fucks up, people give X ActivityPub app a new set of eyes and continue to help developers strengthen these platforms and build up the community.
A lot of times the things we want don’t happen in 1 big moment, it’s a lot of continuous smaller moments that eventually form into something greater.
It’s going to take a lot of effort to build out a new platform, especially one built off the concept of decentralization. I think we should continue to build our communities here, and do our best to help this platform thrive.
This reminds me an old quote, often attributed to Gandhi: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. We shouldn’t take it too seriously and assume victory out of that quote, but even then it gives me some optimism:
It means that the protests had enough of an effect that some people are actually talking about them, even to discredit them.
I don’t think that Reddit will die now either. (Not even Digg died yet. It’s still there.) However my hopes is that people can damage Reddit Inc.'s value assessment enough to make the IPO a fiasco, and punish the company for giving its own users a middle finger. And then Reddit spiral down into obsolescence.