Yeah, but on the other hand, a lot of the world works on the basis of informal agreements and trust.

Think of it this way. Some artists wouldn't have posted their art online if they knew the art would be farmed by AI scrapers. Some people wouldn't have said things on the internet if they knew it was permanent, or even in chats if they knew there were permanent logs. Similarly, some mods wouldn't have modded if they knew reddit saw them as discardable.

Nobody reads the TOS or can see into the future, so the trust of users boils down to one simple idea. They joined a system that was working in one way, and they trust that way remains unchanged. Changes to the original agreement, no matter small the changes are or how informal the agreement, are seen as a breach of trust and it affects. For websites, this has long lasting consequences.

Because if a brand is known to have changed once, you can bet it will change twice. If users were disregarded once, they will be disregarded twice.

So the problem with the protest isn't the protest itself. For most, the apollo app doesn't really matter. iirc it doesn't even have that many users compared to how many users reddit has a whole, so few people were actually affected by it.

The problem is that the less you can trust reddit to just "be reddit" as you know it, the less you can trust it to remain reddit in the future.

People leave brands not because a change was particularly shitty, but because they assume it will only get shittier from now on so they decide to invest their loyalty elsewhere. This means that minor inconveniences like the redesign, more ads, a shitty video player, no more CSS, etc., don't matter much alone. But the general trend that it will only get worse matters a lot. Specially for users that spend most time on the platform.

On the web, this often coincides with the enshittification process. When a brand like Reddit runs out of VC money and needs to turn a profit, they will make small changes to make more money off users. These small changes a little inconvenient, but sow a lot of distrust.