There are 1,820 Subreddits gone dark and counting, as of this post. Thought others might get a kick out of this; it's kinda wild watching them go one by one. Really interested to see what this looks like tomorrow.
Does anybody know what is Reddit's userbase size? It's difficult to put some of the numbers in https://reddark.untone.uk/ in perspective. Using percentages on the Combined User Count would be more descriptive, for instance.
There's no way there are 120,000 active subreddits, unless 'active' means a least one post per month. The same 200 subreddits rotate in r/popular and r/all.
My local city subreddit is always pretty active, but it hardly has any users. I think there's lots of small, niche subs that have a decent level of activity. Just because they don't have enough users to ever hit the frontpage is kind of immaterial to that.
It may be a drop in the bucket, but the long term effect is that there will be fewer people, much fewer mods and those who will remains won't have the same quality of tools to moderate. And this is happening before they are going public
I've seen users there mocking the protest. Even outrightly being hostile to individual users who post support. And when I look at their profiles I see that they are mostly 3 or 4-year-old accounts.
It seems that you are right. The users who came into Reddit accompanying its decline, simply do not care and are part of the mindless shitposters who partially ruined the site.