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?
Three things happened:
RedReader did get a free api key for being accessible for screen readers. All the other third party apps got left in the dust.
The people who were seriously mad came here. Lemmy was still a bit of a ghost town before these protests, and it was around this time that it gained enough traction to be a viable platform imo.
The people that didn’t leave got waited out by reddit and went back.