The subreddit r/steam, about the digital game storefront, received as many other subreddits a notice to open the community again, or else the mods would be replaced by those who abide.
The mods followed suit posting the following automod message under every new post:
As ya'll likely know, we've been dark to support the blackout against reddit's antagonistic behavior towards its own userbase. The admins sent us a message today saying we must open or get removed, so here we are.
For those of you browsing this subreddit on non-official apps (Reddit is Fun, Apollo, Sync, Boost, etc), they will break on July 1st due to reddit's new policies. We're opening back up but will leave permanent stickies in the subreddit and threads to keep folks in the know.
Our Discord [contains link to https://discord.gg/steam] server is active, don't forget to check it out.
Good luck and god speed.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
On visit, you quickly notice there is a community wide effort to focus on the literal topic of the given name and post about vapors, steam trains, and kitchen appliances. While posts about the gaming platform get downvoted.
I think it's more likely people will get bored and just stop going to reddit. Right now the ones taking part in the protest are the creators and hard core users, while the casual users either aren't taking part or are just not using reddit right now.
Longer term this will destroy reddit on google searches ruining one of the major drivers of traffic.
In the short term it's a question of if the casual users get tired first and stop going to reddit, or the hard core users get bored of trolling spez. If the former happens first then reddits non-troll traffic dies off and when the hard core users get bored and leave and then there will be almost nobody left.
Ultimately in order for the protesters to win they don't need to permanently destroy reddit, just to effectively shut it down for the next 6 months or so as literally this entire thing, both the changes reddit instituted and the backlash, is about the IPO. Spez was looking to pump the value quickly so he could cash out and so he went with some incredibly aggressive and anti-user policies that he hoped would generate a massive revenue spike and look good to investors. Instead the users are giving spez a boot to the teeth and reminding him that he has nothing without them.