It does matter because it inspires newer platforms that aren't as shitty like Lemmy, PixelFed, Mbin, and PeerTube.

People will accept anything to not be inconvenienced in a purely consumer society.

That doesn't matter to me. When a company does shit like this, I won't use it and will actively avoid it. People can do what they want and if they want to be abused constantly that's on them. I don't really care. I make my choice and I stick with it. Change will never happen with companies, they don't care unless they actually get charged more then the money they make from their abuse and we all know that will never happen .

Well I don't know about the Reddit stuff not mattering—I occasionally still check on it for a couple of niche communities and the Reddit I used to enjoy has basically died, it's like the place is filled with angry idiots now. Those people were always there before but usually buried under a load of downvotes where you could mostly ignore them; they now seem to be a majority of those left contributing over there.

They killed the golden goose in scaring off enough of the people contributing most interesting posts and comments (who were doing it entirely for free!) that the lunatics have taken over and shat on everything

Each of these exoduses moves the bar a little bit. We only lose if we give up. Eventually the bad decisions will catch up to them, as long as we keep pushing.

I don't know about you, but what I learned is we'll build our own Youtube with blackjack and hookers.