The internet, really. Didn't get introduced to it until late highschool, so by that time I already had lots of painful experiences trying to find information for papers and projects at the local libraries. Being able to find information on a computer was kind of mind-blowing.
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.
This is my first post on Kbin... just noticed the Microblog section, should we be using that instead? This is all new to me!
Kbin needs quite a few UX improvements, speaking as a designer/photographer
I don't know anything about development though