I think that the John Oliver thing was useful to raise awareness, but people eventually confused a situational strategy with an actual solution.
Besides NSFW-ing, mods could’ve also promoted ad blocker usage, the sort of consumption criticism that advertisers outright despise, scorched the earth (slowly removing content from the subs), and harshly restricting the scope of the subreddit, not just through a “haha John Oliver” but a permanent solution. Or just stop moderating at all, since all those clowns that u/ModCodeOfConduct is putting on the place of older mods are incompetent clowns and powertrippers.
mods could’ve also promoted ad blocker usage
Except a huge number of people only ever use reddit on mobile. There are no ad blockers that can target specific advertisements inside of an app itself. You can do network wide advertisement blocking with things like pihole, but the people using reddit on mobile aren’t the people setting up a network wide domain filter. I only ever used reddit on the desktop through old.reddit.com, but I could see the writing on the wall that they’re going to get rid of that sooner rather than later.
Around 70% of the users are on mobile, more specifically. However my point still stands - even if only 10% of the desktop users pick an ad blocker, this means at least 3% less ad revenue for Reddit Inc., it’s quite a bit.
Another thing that they could be doing is to create a bunch of rules that would displease mobile users the most, but that would not be detected as “targetting mobile users”. Such as banning for emoji usage, or for writing “R/subreddit” instead of “r/subreddit”, this sort of stuff. Aiming at actually destroying the subreddit, so people migrate elsewhere.
But for that they’d need to accept that their Reddit communities are lost, and yet most of them are still wallowing in that “no, we can recover Reddit!” wishful “thinking”.
