It kinda reminds me of what happened to rural buses in Canada. We had small bus companies going all over the place. Greyhound bought them all out and ran the whole thing as a monopoly for a few years.

Then they decided it was too much trouble and shut the operations down.

For the last twenty years there are no rural buses at all. If you want to get from point a to b outside of town, it's flight or drive.

Seems the person that spread that was mistaken.

They deleted content that was in public subreddits, then when the privated subreddits started going public again, the posts he made in those became visible again, making it seem certain content he deleted was being undeleted.

So far, there's been no verifiable report of actual undeletion of content.

But besides all that, with GDPR and the similar California laws, Reddit is already asking to get sued and get the EU on their ass, for not deleting peoples data on request, as compliance requires.

I've just been sorting my comments by highest score and replacing a dozen or so each day with something like "-> fediverse". So far none have been restored. Most of the lower scored comments don't have value to anyone anyway so I'm just ordering by most impact until I get bored.

Not participating isn't the only choice.

On days I'm feeling particularly petty I go into discussions and vote down the good comments and vote up the bad ones just to make the signal to noise ratio worse. Yes, I'm that petty.

One time i think r/darkhumor did a while ago like make random people mods (or is it r/darkjokes ??) and... yea lol

I assume they mean go blackout again during Reddit's IPO/Initial Public Offering of Reddit stock in an attempt to tank the stock price.

It will definitely be a slow death. The sound of a few engaged users uniting in protest isn't what will scare Reddit. The sound that will scare them is the sound of many casual users going "Meh" when minimally-moderated subs plagued with spammers and repost bots finally bore the doom-scrolling zombies looking for a momentary dopamine rush from Tik-Tok videos and easily digestible memes.

If the more engaged posters have moved over, do we really need the lurkers and mediocre posters to prop up the new discussion locations?

It was nice having everything in one place, but if everyone came over then it would just be the same thing on a new platform.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I haven't been back to reddit since the blackouts started. No desire to.

Keep in mind that Digg is around to this day. These actions won't sink Reddit overnight. And Reddit isn't done cleaning up for the IPO. As they do more and more of these prep actions, more users will bleed out. Hopefully the Fediverse gets more and more traffic to be a place other users look towards.