Hi.
I help run r/AgainstHateSubreddits — we (the moderators and the userbase) persuaded hundreds or thousands of other moderators and Reddit users to protest Reddit’s choice to invite hate groups to the site.
It took five years of documenting, then 9 months of intense organising, alignment with advertiser’s goals, and an opportune pivot off of Reddit management putting out statements supporting Black Lives Matter (and surviving doxxing, assassination attempts by neoNazis, and other criminal harassment) but we persuaded Reddit to kick hate groups off the site.
So it can happen. It just requires so much more focus, dedication, and work than most people are willing to put in.
The API protests had a reason to exist; Subreddit communities were able to stave off waves and floods of scammers, spammers, trolls, and terrorists because of access to the API, and in spite of Reddit’s Laissez-Faire policy towards community interference and lack of tools for moderators integrated into their product.
They had been working to get moderator tools in the official app to parity with what’s available through desktop mod tools, bots, and use of the API (including third party apps) - but didn’t get there before killing the tools we rely on to fight scammers, spammers, bigots, and terrorists.
And then the CEO sneered at us.
We built successful communities while he turned a blind eye to violent extremists, and then prioritized building collectible Reddit trading cards on top of cryptocurrency instead of a usable official app.
The protests failed because they had no one person officially owning the movement, no one person negotiating, no one person making a statement of “what we have to see”. It also failed because the people who got kicked off the site a few years ago never really went away, and put their trolling into it. It also failed because many of the third party apps were essentially just sophisticated Fuskers aimed at Reddit - selling their own adverts, charging for their experience by subscriptions, etc despite these being prohibited by the API TOS they agreed to. These are not the kind of people that can be partnered with.
It also failed because the people undertaking the protests used methods that had been piloted by trolls trying to make Reddit pay for kicking r|CoonTown off the site in 2015. Reddit admins had 8 years of learning how subreddit mods could hose things up - and had contingency plans in place.
Overall it failed because it was simply full of sound and fury (at incompetent Reddit management) - but, ultimately, without any real goals.