If you go to Reddit, you will still see their ads, be they obvious or hidden through disguising as user interaction (bots are more or less obvious, AI is at the stage where they can fake users). You drive engagement and site traffic. The only way to do anything disadvantegous to Reddit is to stop going to Reddit (if you also delete all your content they have less things to put inbetween ads for the remaining users). You are the product they offer to advertisers, be it through being the buyer for advertised things or providing content to put between the ads so the users who may buy those things don’t only see ads. Your enjoyment of the platform is largely if not completely irrelevant from the corporate standpoint. If anything, your disgruntlement can make you engage more providing them with more content to put between ads.
you’re not wrong about that, but one thing is missing here, one thing that will start becoming clear on July 1: people need to stop thinking of reddit as a place, a platform, that can somehow be “saved”, that, somehow, everything is going to be ok.
come July 1, there will be a sudden and noticeable drop in quality as 3rd party apps and mod tools stop working. In addition to the waves of tens of thousands who have left already, another wave of users will finally call it quits then plus another wave who leave after getting frustrated when they try using the website and/or official app before discovering how intolerable they are to use and just give up. then smaller wave after wave will leave when their subs and the site as a whole all drop off a cliff as far as quality and user moderation become inept and useless or simply vanish altogether.
Reddit is going to slowly transform, over the next few months, just as twitter did to a hellscape of trolls, nazis, and bots with nobody left who either cares or possesses the tools needed to keep them at bay. and this is how the reddit death is different than what happened with Digg-- what happened there was a massive change to how the whole site worked and looked. one day, everyone was instantly affected, and unanimously hated it. it took mere weeks for most people to leave forever. Reddit’s death is slow and painful for a smaller group at first then later for everyone, many of which who can’t or won’t admit that the writing is on the wall, and that Reddit, as we all knew it, is dead; spez killed it. it will always have users (digg is still around), but it will never, ever be what it was. the well is poisoned.
as far as I’m concerned, there’s no point in spending any energy trying to save it or even protesting. trolling and vandalism ae just petty and childish. it’s better to just move on. and while news of the repeated self-ownership of spez in the news can be entertaining, I can’t see it as anything else than the voyeurism of yet another overconfident and entitled tech bro self-destructing. i won’t deny taking some pleasure in it myself, yes, but I feel a little dirty about it.
in the end, I’ve decided to just move on and focus my time and energy on lemmy and what I can do to contribute here. Reddit and spez don’t need our help fucking themselves over-- they’ve done that well enough already.
You are the voice of reason but I don’t think you appreciate just how much I enjoy being petty.