They won in the fact they passed their shitty policy and killed off third party apps with relatively minimal resistance.

But you're right in that this was always going to damage Reddit in the long run.

And yet, reddit is still being used with pretty much identical traffic to before all of this (the "exodus" is essentially a rounding error when you compare reddit traffic variation to other platforms' traffic variation, a statistical variation that can be ignored), moderators are still moderating, and this entire debacle will be almost entirely forgotten in a few months. Except now they don't have competing phone clients, they can shove their nft crap and ads down redditors' throats, and the IPO won't be affected by this at this rate.

I thought it would be different. I thought there was no way the majority of reddit would find it so hard to leave. It's harder to leave other platforms when they prioritize you connecting with your own peers, but reddit? A news aggregator with comments? People simply didn't care enough to leave.

Lemmy has been an amazing replacement since this bullshit and now the good apps are coming over. You lose, Reddit.

Welcome to the other digg effect.