You know the Joker meme with Murray telling him “you’re laughing, people are dying on the street and you’re laughing”, and that’s not how the quote goes. These things sort of take on a life of their own really.

The simple answer is that the protest was not an organic movement, it was entirely driven by the moderators of some subreddits, the communities themselves never wanted to participate, some were OK to show solidarity, but the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of users there weren’t being inconvenienced by the API stuff, some were even hostile to the mere mention of migrating elsewhere. Once the mods relinquished, everything went back to normal because it was mostly them being affected by the API changes.

The funny thing about it is that you can very much attach any value you want to anything, it’s just a matter of how much reach your message has and how many people believe it. NFTs ended up crashing because eventually people realize they were worthless, but not before the snake oil salesmen racked in billions from them.

If an influencer with millions of followers sold a bunch of autumn leaves, someone would buy them.