I think you are wrong about the effectiveness of protesting on someone’s platform. The reason is that the “platform” has little intrinsic value, instead good subs are good because well curated content with good moderation. The type protest that is being done here: private, John Oliver meme, nsfw all reduce the quality of content on reddit full stop. This reduces engagement from everyone, even people not aware of the issues or who don’t care, which reduces AD income (fewer clicks, fewer click throughs). The platform can boot moderators who are orchestrating private, John Memes, NSFW tagging but when this is a shared protest held by entire mod teams, you then need to fully replace moderation, unmoderated subs or even undermoderated subs will produce poorly curated content especially compared to prior. Plus, the next level of protest is for protestors who were active on subs but not moderators who are now promoted to mods to protest in the same vein. Reddit is bleeding money from this and more importantly losing trust and views even from lurkers only. I think the protest path works and it just needs to be followed through.