
Reddit is nothing without users posting and upvoting posts and comments. If all, or a large proportion of the users stopped using the site, reddit would have to listen or they’d stop being useful. I think there are two problems:
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As you said, users don’t realize the power they have. It’s a bit more nuanced than that, they do realize the power of the collective, but don’t think the collective will exercise that power, and thus won’t act individually. It’s the same as “my vote doesn’t matter, it’s just one vote”. This is obviously a self-fulfilling prophecy because they are making it happen, they simply need to follow what they think is right.
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A lot of users don’t care. Again, a bit more nuanced than that, most users probably have a preference reddit listens to their users, keeps the 3rd party app access, etc. But they don’t care enough to do anything about it, which in effect means in any practical way, they don’t care. I’m guessing that to them this feels a bit of a “niche” problem and will use the official app. There are a small amount of users, like me and probably you reading this who’ve left reddit and won’t go back.
The protests have worked. They’ve moved a motivated minority over to lemmy and we’re creating communities, posts and comments, contributing to apps and running instances. We’ll spend our time and effort improving the tools and communities for the fediverse ready. Hopefully, with enough of reddit being reddit causing more waves of people in the future to seek another platform, the fediverse will grow and reddit will dwindle. That’s my hope anyway.
I actually have really fond memories of Sabayon, the community was really nice. It also served as a good gateway into Gentoo by giving you a pre-configured usable system, including its binary package manager, but also gentoo’s emerge (not that you should use both at the same time).