See I'm taking this as another hit to the quality of the platform
Us who flee aren't the ones who lurk, but the ones who make comments or produce content.
Exoduses like this have happened before and the quality has sunk ever so slightly.
The black out of subreddits will hopefully make more people aware of the changes, and make Reddit know that people don't like said changes.
It's still a good thing even if nothing happens.
A lot of lurkers are gonna flee the platform too though, but they might not join other sites/communities like Lemmy to replace it. So the loss for Reddit will be bigger than those who choose to migrate to Lemmy.
And I expect a few lurkers from Reddit, like myself for the most part, are gonna be more active on Lemmy, since the community seems a lot less toxic. I didn't care too much about contributing on Reddit, since pretty much every discussion attracted trolls, spammers, or just hostile users, and the discussions, the exchange of ideas and experiences just vanished or drowned in a sea of noise.
Same for me really, mainly just lurked in my favorite communities on Reddit for the most part. Contemplating checking out some forums too in the meantime to get my daily tech and discussion fix, while the communities grow over here on Lemmy
The hilarious part is that Fidelity, a current investor in Reddit, already cut the valuation of their stake in Reddit by 41%.. Its obvious that investors already see Reddit as a sinking ship and that the social media value bubble run on debt is deflating, now that the free money Fed policy is a distant memory. All these moves are going to do is shutter their company with zero to show for it. Had they just done nothing, their IPO would have probably gone better lmfao. Most intelligent Reddit ceo moment.
even funnier... as a dinosaur, reddit could have persisted on and grown. there were enough old souls wedded to reddit to make it less swampy than some other centralized sites. the gamification of interactions and internet point scoring was mostly ignorable with minor effort. now... there will be a non-trivial exodus of people. people who's identities are not completely tied to the daily dopamine hit. in other words, the very same people that build communities.