While I’ve followed these recent changes since the Pushshift shutoff, it’s really only been in the past week that I’ve seen this gain “mainstream” attention. The more of these subreddit-going-dark announcements reach the page, the more people realize this is a widespread issue - even if they don’t click, read, or even think about what’s going on or why, they’re aware of it.
I’ve seen several dozen of these posts reach the front page, plus a litany of media outlet publications. That legitimately matters as an input to financial projections in the context of their upcoming IPO, and it matters even more as a signal to prospective investors, retail or institutional.
Our modern reality is often served to us via algorithms that are trained to optimize for things; the most common thing for content platforms to optimize for is engagement, and the most common signal for these platforms is the upvote. In over a decade I’ve never seen any topic reach front page across such a variety of posts and subreddits, and that is a direct result of individuals upvoting these posts.
I think this demonstrates, already, the collective ability to mobilize action across communities, even if the action is reduced to the simplest Boolean upvote. And that’s an indication that widespread collective action can be coordinated.
I'd go even further and say it reinforces it: despite being the most visible coordinated Reddit event in the past 10 years, nothing will come out of it and everything will be back to normal after 2 days.
Also, they can unprivate the subs on their own website if they want to, and pretty sure they have data backups if they delete it. Only the government could do anything about this, but I'm not sure any laws were broken here, they just started charging money for commercial use of their valuable pool of data.
It has in the past.
Communities went dark in protest due to reddit not shutting down vaccine conspiracy subreddits during the pandemic forcing reddit to act.
They also went dark when reddit failed to properly vet a new hire who had been a politician with a weird link to bad acts involving a child, forcing reddit to remove them.
There have been other protests forcing responses too. I remember one involving poor moderation tools, and another involving the BLM protests.
They have everything to lose by giving into demands here, losing out on corpos paying bank to have access to all their data. They gained nothing from allowing third party apps, they just serve their content with the ads stripped (thus only lose revenue). While I do pity them, they should have expected this to happen at some point.