Prior to the protest reddit was in full support of the protest. Most polls on subs supported a shutdown. Now, seemingly every community cant understand why the protest was needed and they’re calling it a mod power trip. There is a 3rd possibility. This is an unfounded conspiracy but reddit themselves could be manipulating scores.
See the NFL thread if you don’t mind sending traffic
https://reddit.com/r/nfl/comments/14b11kh/were_just_here_so_we_dont_get_fined/
Unfortunately it’s a fairly common pattern among humans, people don’t prepare ahead of time for disasters that have “never happened before.” Or that haven’t happened in their lifetime. Especially when those preparations cost them something, be it time or money or effort.
It’s been long enough since Digg that this generation didn’t believe that it would happen to Reddit too. Maybe someday it might happen to the Fediverse, somehow - there’s only so much you can do with protocol design alone to proof against centralization, we’re already seeing some interesting cracks around the Beehaw defederation mess.