Something I always find odd is how many people feel compelled to gleefully tell people who are trying to make a difference that it's stupid to try and nothing will make a difference. It's really the glee that gets me (as a cynic, I don't disagree that most efforts are doomed).

The latest example of this is the reddit protest, where a bunch of people on discords I'm on, etc., are gleefully proclaiming that the protesters are all idiots and everyone will be back to using reddit as normal.

I don't see why this will make a difference, but so what? If it doesn't, people did a low cost protest that didn't make a difference. And if works and drives change, then that's great..

Why should this be upsetting enough to people that they need to proclaim that anyone who's involved is an idiot?

I can see why people don't like, e.g., blocking highways to protest big oil, which inconveniences lots of normal people without impacting oil execs at all, but this one seems fairly benign.

A lot of the same people made similar comments about Mastodon: "they'll all be back soon", etc.

And yet, here we are. I didn't go back to Mastodon to take a big stand or w/e (I just found better discussion here and continue to see that when I check Twitter).

A lot of people seemed really incensed that people would want to try something else, leading to similar angry/gleeful comments predicting people would be back in a few weeks. Why care so much that other people find another platform nicer?

Personally, I generally think it's pretty great when people try.

To pick a technical example, for the early years of Zig development (back when Andy was working on it in his spare time, while still working at OkCupid), my comment to people was that I was extremely impressed with Andy's dedication, execution, and vision, but I thought Zig was going to fail just based on the base rate of new languages succeeding, but^2 I thought it was great that he had a reasonable enough financial plan to try.