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I think the first one who talked about it was Christian Selig the developer of the popular third-party Reddit app Apollo. He said that it would cost him $20 million per year to keep his Apollo app running if he had to pay Reddit's new API pricing structure.

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I don't remember seeing him post anything about calling for a blackout, but his posts definitely kicked off my awareness and I think many others as well. I'd be very interested to see if he mentioned it before the 10th, which IIRC (probably not - it may have been 8th or something) is when there was a tipping point and a bunch of mods announced they'd be going black. It seems against his personality, he doesn't seem like the type to call for action like that. Tried googling it but didn't find anything during a quick search

He specifically disavowed (but supported, indirectly) the blackouts at first. He initially didn't want to risk Reddit retaliating at him for calling for a blackout when (at the time) communication was still somewhat positive.

But he did acknowledge the protest, which I'm sure gave it a lot of attention it didn't have before.

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