The last major holdouts in the protest against Reddit’s API pricing relented, abandoning the so-called “John Oliver rules” which only allowed posts featuring the TV host. It's the official end of the battle. The Reddit protest is over, and Reddit won.
Not really sure what Gizmodo thinks that Reddit “won”. They damaged their reputation, degraded the quality of their site, popularized competition, and embittered a significant portion of their volunteer labor force.
They won in the fact they passed their shitty policy and killed off third party apps with relatively minimal resistance.
But you’re right in that this was always going to damage Reddit in the long run.
Relay for Reddit is still going strong, the dev spent a lot of time doing API call measurements and optimizations the past few months. He’s switching to a subscription model soon though.
Lemmy has been an amazing replacement since this bullshit and now the good apps are coming over. You lose, Reddit.
Welcome to the other digg effect.