Honestly i’m sure this is the best thing that could happen for the reddit execs in terms of user engagement. Writing “fuck spez” on reddit is like shouting “save the planet” from a cruise ship.
I wrote about this elsewhere. Every post about Reddit or place has tons of comments like yours insisting that any engagement is good for Reddit. I disagree.
Reddit want dissenting users to leave! They have no interest in retaining it’s traditional userbase of cynical, lefty, tech-savvy users. They’re incredibly intolerant of advertising and difficult to monetise, and much of the reason why Reddit hasn’t made as much money as some of its competition.
They’d rather we all went elsewhere and left them with doomscrollng cryptobro memelords that don’t care if a post is a corporate shill or not, as long as it’s entertaining.
Sure, not engaging with their site reduced their numbers and thus value. But the number of users on Lemmy is a tiny fraction that I guarantee they’d be happy to lose if it made their userbase more tolerant of corporate bullshittery.
My goal isn’t to knock a fraction off their IPO valuation, it’s to bring other users and communities over to better platforms like this one. Or, perhaps, for Reddit to realise they done fucked up and roll back some of those user-hostile changes. That takes advocacy and reminding people of the failings of the platform’s admins.
This form of protest is valid and I support it.
Yep, whenever I see those type of comments I always think to myself that they’re secretly pro-reddit and want to deter us from advertising Lemmy and other alternatives on Reddits BIGGEST attraction and putting the FUCK SPEZ where people WILL see it.
I don’t think a foil hat is necessary
Permission to use this in the future for similar comments. With credit, of course. You explained it better than i ever could.
Quite a lot of people just like scrolling through nonsensical shorts and staged garbage squeezed between sponsored posts and fake game ads. I don’t understand it but it’s what most people like to do. Look at Facebook, it’s still making money. Reddit’s doing the same formula. Killing third party apps was just part of penning people in.
