The front page has gotten worse and worse over the last few weeks. Posts are just filled with Top Level spam comments with no replies. There has to be some kind of coordinated effort by the admins to make it look like the site is still doing fine.

The protest wasn’t successful, but it’s made enough people think twice about their reddit usage that it did something. I think a lot of the mods thought thought that reddit would cave, and now they haven’t they’re facing the destruction of what many of them have built from next to nothing (Mostly mid size subreddits) they’re not prepared to nuke it all.