I'm surprised there is strong support to the protest. But obviously there will always be people who lick boots.

I'm suspecting phantom upvotes. Neutral or pro-Reddit comments get highly upvoted suspiciously quickly after a sub comes back on line, drowning out anything else.

Its such a weird complaint that these people are having right now. They're demanding that unpaid people come back and labor for them for free and/or give away the tools they've created for free.

It's like they have no idea how reddit works. People whining that the NFL sub is closed and demanding it to be reopened for instance. They can go make their own sub and moderate it themselves, but they dont. The entitlement to just demand that people do free labor for you is insane.

It would appear it's mostly bots, probably paid for by reddit (or interested groups) to muddle the waters.

I have seen countless posts trying to discredit the fediverse, how it won't work because it isn't financially backed (completely ignoring that email is still a thing), or how Mastodon apparently failed. On top of that, there are tons of comments in the threads for subs that went dark where the commenter argues "all this does is hurt the sub". but when you look into the commenter, they have no previous history of being active in these subs at all.

But, i've seen this kind of activity all over reddit for the past 2 years. Especially when something unpopular is happening. There is a lot of the same type of crap you see during the presidential elections of the US. A lot of fake comments, posts, and statistics, and other things to try steer the public opinion in an engineered direction.

My friend started using reddit about 3 years ago. He doesn't care about the blackout at all and told me I was being mad about a free service trying to make money. He'll just keep using it until he can't then lurk elsewhere. I told him to stop being an ass, but that's unlikely. His stupid attitude is shared by a vast swath of reddit and will ultimately lead to the site's total decay.

sometimes I'm upset at how apathetic people on reddit are

Don't worry too much about it. There's still going to be people using Reddit. You're never going to convince everybody about everything. My parents still use Facebook.