I'm the creator and mod of a sub with 25K users. A post was made by one of the users asking whether we should participate in the balckout. I didn't notice a single comment that said no. Apparently it's tough to get human beings to agree on anything.

A lot of those mods held polls in their communities and among their peers before going dark. I don't think the large subreddits are getting unilaterally shut down.

it's always like that -- reddit users always like drama so i did not expect they would vote otherwise. i think the whole idea is bad though

Reddit has much bigger problems to solve. First and foremost, that users have no recourse from moderation abuses, and this is killing the community more than the API changes.

If the people voted for it, how are the mods holding them hostage? Both the mods and the people want it.

voted for 2 days, right?

Initially yes, but multiple communities made new polls for the continued blackout.

How? They were offline

None of the subs i know did

They went public and then private.

Example?

Looking at the comments in this thread it doesn't feel like a democratic decision: https://old.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/148xygd/rstarwars...

You hand-waved the response that users voted for this, and then simply repeated the (seemingly wrong) stance that mods are forcing this in anyone.

> that users have no recourse from moderation abuses

Not participating in subreddits with crappy moderators seems like pretty good recourse?

The users that provide the content are pissed too. A significant portion of them will see the third party app they use die. I don't want to use their official app, and would be willing to pay a fair rate to do so, but their API prices are way beyond a fair rate.

Social media, especially a platform like reddit, has a special relationship with users. They aren't customers. You need the people who post, comment, and moderate or the platform dies.