It didn't, I agree. Lemmy for example was really slow; the type of site that you'd check once a few days. Nowadays however you can pretty much lurk nonstop here, and you know that you'll see more stuff that you want to see. Same deal with other sites.

"Reddit" in the text refers to the platform, and who owns it. They won, but the victory was damn shitty.

"Reddit as the community and its userbase" lost hard.

A lot of the best mods left. Some made it over here to the Fediverse, but a lot of them just stopped. Which is probably better for their mental health.

You still have good mods left over there, but there was also a distinct brain drain.

Some of the best mod tools shut down, and overall the site is just a bit worse to use.

Now, can the remaining mods train up to the level of the ones who left? Sure, but there's going to be that doubt in the back of their minds now. Reddit Admins can no longer be trusted to let mods run their communities.

And the next time Reddit Admins do something that pisses off the community, more people will leave and not look back. The IPO is still looming in the future, and there are a lot of fuckups for Spez to make.

The standards of the "immigration leftover" might be low, but even those will eventually migrate once they get better content elsewhere. And at this rate even IG and TT will be able to offer it, not because they've become better but because Reddit itself is worse.

Yes to both. And that means that the mods who stayed are no longer going to trust Reddit Admins.

Also, the IPO is coming, and there will be stupid policies that are meant to drive up the stock price at the expense of the community.

Look forward to more waves of people abandoning Reddit in the future.

Anybody thinking this whole shindig was a “pyrrhic victory” is deluding themselves. [...] y’all are lying to yourselves if you think this will massively impact Reddit’s IPO [...]

I strongly disagree, for four reasons:

1. Bringing people to the Fediverse hurts Reddit. Alts have a chicken-and-egg problem: not enough users to get content, not enough content to get users. Lemmy and Kbin managed to avoid this problem, partially, due to the protests.
2. Bad press does impact the IPO. Investors are only willing to invest high stakes of money in risky businesses as long as they promise a great return on the investment; however, the press shows that Reddit doesn't have a bright future (less RoI), and the userbase is pissed (higher risk). As such I do believe that those lowered the amount of money that the "old" Reddit investors will get out of the initial public offering, as new investors won't be willing to pay as much for the shares.
3. Disengagement. Profit comes from user visits, but value (ability to generate profit in the long term) is from the content. And yet the revolts disengaged the most the ones who would generate and sort that content on first place; even the ones who might not leave (like we did) won't be as eager to post their stuff there.
4. Small subs. The article mentioned 1.8k subreddits still closed, right? And yet small subs are the ones that actually retain users - because they're about everything and a bit more. Those likely won't get new mods or threats from u/ModCodeOfConduct saying "mods, keep working for free or we'll put other suckers in your place".

Could the moderators get a victory? I don't think so; I believe that they should've scorched earth and migrated. Even then, the revolts did damage against Reddit, that Reddit could go without. Reddit might've won the war against the jannies but it didn't benefit from its own victory, well, that's a Pyrrhic victory.

and clever marketing

Clever marketing could do something but Reddit is not clever. (If Reddit was clever it would've killed the 3PAs without a revolt, by boiling some frogs.)

But I wouldn’t be surprised if Reddit chugs along just fine.

I mentioned this in other threads, but my prediction is that Reddit will neither suddenly crash nor stay alive "just fine". It'll slowly go downhill.