It was never going to do more than get people talking, the number of subreddits isn’t as important as what the long term impact to users and quality will be. They have signaled their interests are not user centric, it wont be the last outrage I’m sure but they’ll keep getting away with it if there isn’t a clear alternative and people keep going back.

It also lines up with the media attention span. On day 5 “reddit lost users during the blackout” will be a better headline than “blackout still going on fyi”.