I don’t think it was unintended in the sense that the admins didn’t expect these consequences. At least to me, on their posts they seem very aware that what they’re doing is very damaging, but they were stuck with choosing between the lesser of two evils, and they choose what was going to keep them more sane for now.

!devshowerthoughts (community idea?)

I’ve said it (with a different wording) on some post on reddit, I’m saying it again here: I want history to repeat itself. Not because I have a sadistic need to see reddit fail, but because this will ultimately be better for the users.

All of these protests are a nice sentiment, but I can’t help but think the take I’ve read from some people is right: this is all a “door in the face” technique from Reddit to get people to accept a more reasonable compromise on pricing that they were going for all along, but without taking as much of a PR hit. So people will be relatively happy, and meanwhile reddit will have squeezed redditors just a little more, as they have been doing little by little in the last years. It’s a boiling frog scenario.

So this protest may well “reverse” this specific situation, but it won’t reverse the general trend on governance on Reddit that has been slowly going on for a few years already, mostly around the time that Victoria got canned.

So, to that end, I really want to stop using reddit regardless of the outcome of this debacle. Lemmy seems promising, although it does have its own set of problems. But it’s still on its infancy, I’m sure it’ll grow and at least some of these problems will be fixed.