What I don't understand is why that matters. Why make it an us vs them thing?

Because many protesters called reddit their home for years and would probably have never left if what happened didn't happen. They don't hate reddit - they hate what spez and the top management are doing to it.

In my case, there are still communities there that haven't moved here nor on other alternatives. You can say start a community, but that's being simplistic. It's hard to make a community when you're the only one active there.

Exactly what was achieved, nothing. The API blackouts showed the admins don't care what the community thinks or wants, and no amount of fuck spez on r/palce was going to change that.

I disagree. This is about money. This is about investors. This is about advertisers. It's the same reason why there are no ads on nsfw subs.

Sure, they can show investors/advertisers how much traffic there is, but they also can't hide how much turmoil there is. And we all know advertisers care about how their brand is perceived, while investors are also concerned about a site's stability. At the very least, it'll give them pause since there are other places to advertise without all the hate and instability.

Investors and businesses aren't (always) stupid. It's impossible to miss that many accounts on r/place were bots which means nothing to their goals (and even hinder them).

And the majority of R users will never care. That is my point. Most people go there for fun and do not care about anything else.

Everyone knows that. But what about the users who don't even know what's going on? What about those who want to leave but have no idea there are alternatives?

And don't bother telling me no one will come after learning about alternatives. Tons of us came here exactly because of that. It may not be a huge wave (probably a trickle, if that), but it's much better than nothing.

That will not change.

Then why bother protesting ANYTHING at this point? And I'm not talking about just reddit.