Jim.
The protests, especially on the auction bulletin boards, accomplished a lot.........First, eBay made some rules to discourage reserve auctions, partially because hidden reserves bothered many buyers (witness the complainers on this BB), but mainly because eBay hoped to make more money overall by discouraging reserve auctions/forcing sellers to have non-reserve autions instead. (EBay didn't like reserve auctions because they resulted in more non-sales than non-reserve auctions. Too many sellers were having reserve auctions to generate an e-mail mailing list to sell their stuff commission-less "under the table".)..................Second, came the protests from the eBay sellers threatening to leave eBay for other on-line auctions. They made selfserving arguments about reserve auctions having an "air of mystery" (about the reserve price) that buyers supposedly loved. And they said the mystery of the reserve and low starting bid led buyers to click to look at the auction, think about it and then bid ("what the hell, I am already clicked here viewing the auction, so why not make a low bid?"). Seeing these bids on the search/browse lists, attracts other bidders, the sellers said...............Then, eBay did change the recently announced new rules.

So the protests worked.