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?
The enshitification is real and the way to fight this is by collective action and escalation. When the mods took action collectively it shook Reddit and forced them to ban the offending users. If the userbase maintained the pressure with a boycott there is no way Reddit Inc could withstand the pressure. However, the asset owning class have configured our society to prevent collective organisation and protest. Power is being concentrated in fewer and fewer white mens hands. This Epstein-class of people tend to be psychopaths and narcissists because those are useful attributes for amassing power. We see the effects of this everywhere we look in the form of censorship, punitive legal statute, lobbying, corruption, inflation and the rise of fascism. Open source projects such as Lemmy, Wikipedia, Mastodon, Linux, Signal, etc, form the basis of an antidote.