[58x14]

I pretty strongly disagree with this take. I’ve used Reddit for over a decade almost entirely as a “lurker” meaning without an account. The majority of what I watched and read has depended on that reaching the “front page of the internet.”

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.

[iLoveOncall]

I'm not sure how any of that goes against the comment that you're answering to?

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.