Prior to the protest reddit was in full support of the protest. Most polls on subs supported a shutdown. Now, seemingly every community cant understand why the protest was needed and they’re calling it a mod power trip. There is a 3rd possibility. This is an unfounded conspiracy but reddit themselves could be manipulating scores.
See the NFL thread if you don’t mind sending traffic
https://reddit.com/r/nfl/comments/14b11kh/were_just_here_so_we_dont_get_fined/
Probably the latter. Most users likely didn’t care about any of it enough to vote or participate in conversations leading up to blackouts, but got annoyed when they couldn’t use reddit the same way. The rest of us probably started minimizing usage and/or deleting accounts.