I honestly feel like - and this is just my thought, no data to back it up - all the major companies or sites felt like they were the only ones around, there was nothing to replace them, so they could make whatever decisions they wanted to make.
Like when we all left Digg for Reddit - Reddit was already a thing so it was a relatively "painless" switch. With this one it's like... Musk took over twitter and I sort of heard about the fediverse but I'm personally waiting for Hive to get a desktop - but once Reddit started doing it's thing it was like "yeah I really need to move now" and kbin had a much better landing page than any of the other fediverse things I'd stumbled upon which really helped with the onboarding... And it's been nice watching it grow.
But yeah previous to this it was like...there was nothing else available so why did they have to care about what they did if we were "stuck" there with the decisions they were making anyway.
lol...and yet here I am on kbin so - yeah looks like that plan (assuming it's at all correct) didn't pan out entirely like they were hoping.
I don't expect it to have much of an impact on Reddit/u/spez's decision but it /does/ help show Reddit's thought process/response patterns as they take more and more draconian measures to try to "bring the subreddits under control."
I'm *half expecting - and would be amused by - them forcibly opening a subreddit and then "demanding" that "everyone go back to posting normal memes" - like the collective mob/reddit's population is beholden to their whims.
Hopefully, as each decision continues to ripple out, more and more people discover alternatives like kbin. I've been working hard to avoid reddit as much as possible but I'm getting more and more the desire to reach out to the mods of the subreddits I miss and ask them to move over here.