If you were to protest Piggly-Wiggly grocery store, you would do so by not going there and not by tampering their products or blocking people from entering the store.

In point of fact, preventing people from entering a facility is how picketing works.

And your second argument can be turned around to the actual reddit protest itself, like you said reddit is not important so it is equally unimportant, technically speaking, what they are charging for their API.

They are making moderation more expensive and more difficult. This is a labor issue. The fact that the workers are unpaid doesn’t change that. The bosses screwing over workers is not unimportant.

Same thing as if a movie theater were engaging in wage theft against their employees: wage theft is important, but you seeing a movie at that particular theater isn’t.

That’s a fully general argument against strikes. We shouldn’t punish Piggly-Wiggly’s customers by striking; they might not be able to get their groceries somewhere else. We shouldn’t punish drivers by striking at the auto shop; some people won’t be able to get their cars repaired.

The big difference is that r/StarTrek is nowhere near as important as a grocery store or auto shop. People need to eat to live. People need to get places. People don’t need to discuss Star Trek online at all. Much less do they need to discuss it specifically on Reddit. So the argument is more like: we shouldn’t punish customers of Sam’s Nail Salon by striking; they might have to go to Pat’s Nail Salon a couple blocks over instead, and that’s just not fair.

Reddit is making it much more difficult for the moderators to build and maintain communities. They’re also cutting off accessible apps for using Reddit, eliminating a portion of their userbase.

Brass tacks, the community will come back (or another one will form, like r/Star_Trek or something) if people are willing to do the work. This requires them to be okay with doing unpaid labor for Reddit even while Reddit is making that labor harder. They also have to be okay with crossing a picket line.

Most likely, they’ll make a way for people to take over subreddits that went private and have no activity for a while, if there isn’t one already. r/StarTrek might get special treatment, or it might just be shunted over into a new general policy like this.

I’d be much happier to pay if I could ensure I don’t get personalized recommendations and I could use it with yt-dlp. I can probably opt out of personalized recommendations, but I haven’t checked yet because I don’t use youtube through its main interface much.

Right now it’s feeling pretty darn small. Once it hits a million users, it’ll feel fine.