A better protest should have been to use your accounts to turn the site content into something that negatively effects the average user. Make trash posts that do not relate to the subs content and have it heavily upvoted. Mass downvote anything relevant. It was always the quality of the content that its users brought to Reddit that makes people stay. Going dark was a start, but in the end, Reddit can just turn it back on. Trying to quality control content on a post-by-post, day-by-day would be even tougher. If the mods are a part of it as well, Reddit would have to completely overhaul all their mods AND then try to convince another poor sap to do all that work for free.