TLDR: not worth reading the article, it’s just a long list of third party apps that are no longer free anymore, totally ignoring matters such as their usage stats and more importantly the content itself that is now flat-out missing from Reddit. Go to any old thread and you’ll see the “this content has been removed by” (whichever of the automated software to remove posts was used in that case) messages.
Honestly it reads like a shill to promote Reddit as in “hey, all that fuss was for nothing - you should totally come back now”. It got fairly obvious even at the start when it said that the protests
lasts(edit: lasted) for “weeks” - not the more truthful “months”, not “permanent changes”, but the minimum amount they could halfway reasonably get away with stating.I am biased, and this article is far more so, and less forgivably so bc mine is a personal opinion while this is touted as “news”.
I mean, I remember it being weeks myself.
But it’s not as if things went back to the way they were either. There were definitely effects due to those weeks.
Some subs did not protest at all. Some users even went into subs dedicated to discussing the topic like Reddit Alternatives and anti-protested, and still others went so far as to brigade many small, entirely unrelated niche subs, taking over polls asking the actual MEMBERS of those subs what they wanted to do, making any discussion of the situation held hostage by a toxic barrage of venomous filth, often by accounts that seemed to have been created for just that purpose in mind due to their highly suspicious age. In my own sub, we had to record comments by hand b/c we felt that we could not trust automated polling as a result.:-(
Some subs shut down for merely a day or two (as mine did). A few more shut down for a little longer - measured in days to weeks.
But several subs, including some of the top ones on the entire site, shut down for MONTHS. And some even shut down permanently, only to have their decisions overturned by Reddit who sent in scabs to open them back up, months later.
So… it was a spectrum ofc, and perhaps the subs you were interested in were primarily affected for a couple weeks. But on the whole, the long tail of the protests lasted much longer than a mere few days, or even weeks, and the likes of John Olivier pic spam lasted for months.:-)
It’s probably because I generally saw the sub shutdowns as a result of the protest, and not as an ongoing protest. Reddit clearly wasn’t in any talks with the mods at that point and vica versa.
Honestly i’ll just go with it being months. I’m basically just arguing semantics at this point.
