I mean, I kinda feel like this is a way to effectively protest, because even if they can heavy handedly force you to shut up, you can at least force them to actually do that. The more visibly reddit tries to stamp out dissent, the more people will notice them doing that, and the more upset those people will be. Unlike the irl equivalent, there are few stakes for most people in being involved in this kind of digital protest. At the worst, you get banned there and move somewhere else, which you probably were going to eventually do anyway if youre angry enough to protest reddit like this.

Doing things that force reddit’s hand, like making subs nsfw, harms them in some way no matter what: either they do nothing, and lose ad revenue and potentially anger people who just wanted their subs to be what they were, or they capitulate, losing them whatever they wanted to do in the first place and showing precedent for the future, or they try to force things back to normal, and fuel the anger against them even further due to people having feeling restricted. It might not kill the site (even digg and tumblr and such still exist, its very hard for a sufficiently big social site to actually die completely), but it can erode its userbase and grow that of competitors, which reduces the potential revenue the site can make.

At least we can hope that this will severely damage the ipo.

There’s no way to effectively protest a corporation on its own platform. It controls the platform, it can and will change the rules or enforce them unequally just to shut you up, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

You can still make it painful for them on the way out. They are using up a shitload of resources dealing with this, and it will be hurting their image and valuation. The more Reddit has to stomp on its users, the more damage they do to their brand in the long run.

You can’t win, but you can go down fighting, and possibly take Reddit down with you.

True but they can go anytime. In the meantime they’re making a fuss, keeping the issue alive in the news and making Reddit take action instead of making it easy for them.

E.g. “If you want me gone fire me because I’m not quitting so you can save face.”

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.

“The only good move is to leave.”

Completely agree

On one hand, causing chaos on reddit and ending up in the news is maybe good?

On the other hand that drives traffic to the site. Quietly leaving and removed somewhere else will do nothing.

Best case is that video strike where people go just long enough to upload 1gb videos of white noise to tax their servers without adding any content.