As of 12:56pm GMT (7:56am central time), 7742/8299 subreddits are no longer public
The information I initially posted is misleading. Thus, I have edited the title and this content area to report accurate numbers.
As @roofuskit mentioned, the 8299 number is the amount of subreddits that committed to going dark, not the total number of subreddits, which is over 3,000,000.
And as @8thiest was keen to observe, 204 of the top 250 are dark, as you can see from this site: https://save3rdpartyapps.com/
All the nay sayers that it won’t change anything, are right to a point. Yes the message is “it’s only two days, after that it’s fine again!”, if you’re full on corpo. But what the userbase is demonstrating to not just reddit, but future investors on their IPO - is that they are 100% capable of removing everything that makes reddit what it is within days and for an indefinite amount of time. There’s always churn. The amount of potential new users being lost due to massive degradation in public feeds will be noticeable. The amount of lost impressions on ads for mega subs will be noticeable.
To my mind, it doesn’t even matter if this particular two day period hurts them financially. The message is clear. Reddit isn’t some assortment of Twitter schmucks that have no ability to actually have any impact. If there’s nothing to monetize, nothing to push ads through, nothing to attract new users, the platform is worthless and the users hold almost all the power.
If reddit takes away the ability to turn subreddits off, they’ll be deleted next time. This generation is fed up with being helpless pawns in shitty CEO games. I deleted several accounts and don’t have any left. I am done with reddit as an actual user and contributor.
Every time they go toe to toe with their user base they will bleed the users that keep that place running and relevant.
I’m loving that this is actually so wide spread.
It will change things too, not for reddit, but for competitors (like kbin).
A tiny site can only grow so fast, at some point things start breaking (both technically and as a community) and users stop joining, but as sites grow bigger they also gain the ability to grow faster.
The protest means that every possible alternative to reddit has been growing as fast as it can reasonably support. That’s probably not fast enough to hurt reddit this time, but next time it might be.
What will ultimately hurt reddit is the existence of viable alternatives.
I know people are of differing opinions on this and a lot of people are sad to see reddit go out like this, but I’ve personally wanted to dump reddit for like a decade now, but there just wasn’t anywhere to go. Even if it recovers completely, people who are disillusioned will have options now.
I’m just looking forward to news item Reddit puts out gaslighting everyone into thinking nothing of real consequence happened.
Alternate read: every sub that comes back is firmly and clearly telling Reddit that no matter how badly they behave, they will still use the site.
All of this! Plus, from my perspective anyway, this has given a lot of people the chance to get their feet wet with other platforms and ecosystems.
While it may not be a majority, I do believe there will be well seasoned users that see how the whole thing was handled by Reddit, and see the potential in these other avenues, and stay in those new places instead.
So far, I would say I’m one of those users. After a decade on Reddit and decline in quality, I’m certainly happy to call a new platform home and grow with it.