The protests worked, and so did moving/editing/deleting our old content. As one person complains,
I’m not here for Reddit, but for the aggregation of niche communities. I follow a lot of obscure manga that have relatively small followings and recently I got into an IT job which opened a lot of technological exploration for me. The worst part about this change isn’t even that we are losing 3rd party apps, but that only members of the communities I frequent are the ones who care enough to protest. Can’t tell you how many times now I’ve looked something up on Reddit and find an answer to the issue I have, only to realize that the community is closed or the post is deleted in protest. Now we are stuck in this limbo where protests seem to have lost their steam, niche communities are being overthrown and killed because of that greedy little pigboy. Seriously, fuck spez.
This isn’t astroturfing this is trolling. They’re rage baiting.
All can be true simultaneously.
Trolling just means putting forth a view that you don’t actually believe in, but pretending that you do, to get reactions.
Astroturfing is where one is hired to participate, but explicitly hides the affiliation (which can mislead folks into believing that this is someone’s genuine view or a normal troll when it’s actually an effort by an organization like a company to unduly influence public opinion).