Everyone acts like this is hurting reddit. It doesn't make a fuck what they write on that board, every person who places a dot helps Reddit by being a added number on the user board.
But long term it could. People might get annoyed by the lack of content other than protesting and check reddit less. It also keeps the conversation on alternatives like lemmy here.
Also, if reddit believes that the community has genuinely turned against them and will ruin everything on purpose, they might rethink their actions (obviously unlikely).
Sometimes people just like to flip tables out of frustration even if it won't accomplish much. A lot of angry redditors just want to burn it all down and I hope they succeed.
As an extreme example, if /r/place was truly covered with "fuck spez" 100%, would that be an enjoyable thing for people who don't care about what's going on? They'd probably get mad and leave. Which would hurt reddit.
It also costs reddit extra money to deal with all of this.
It's similar to workers protesting instead of just quitting. There's a point to protesting and not everything is solved with a simple boycott.
When digg was dying, many people still used digg, but just to point others to reddit. In hindsight, would you say that it didn't matter since they were still using digg?
They aren't going for long term as they have show the last few years and more so the last few months.... They are pulling a sears and it's working as planned.
Honestly do we even want them? A very large portion of why reddit has turned into such a shithole the last few years is the newer people. Let them have that clusterfuck while we enjoy lemmy .
Eh, I don't think that's fair. There's still a lot of good redditors out there stuck on reddit because they don't know any better. More technical and veteran redditors are more likely to be willing to jump ship because they know how much reddit is a sinking ship and how it's going to end up dying out.
Honestly... yeah. After seeing how Netflix proved that you can give zero fucks about what your customers say and that they will give you more money after you bend them over, I see no reason why Reddit doubling-down on monetized bullshit on the platform wouldn't be equally successful. These big corps realize that no matter how bad it gets, they will always find paying users as long as you give them their dopamine fix, protests or no protests.
The people who are going to spend money on that place are advertisers, all they want is people going to a site where their ad is and will be seen. A giant swastika in the canvas would bring in way more views than everyone drawing happy little trees and flags of their country. Content means nothing, views are the point and it's working.
Advertisers, unlike Reddit, often think about more than raw numbers. And so do the brands who hire those advertisers. Part of why Twitter is hemorrhaging cash is that a lot of brands really don’t want to see their logo displayed next to a giant swastika, even if it means people are seeing their ad.
Sure, a swastika on your front page for months at a time is a bad look. When you give people a place to do "free" art and the draw something inappropriate it creates fast controversy and clicks and a good chance for them to rationalize all the shitty changes they have made recently.
Wrong way around, the shitty changes rationalise the graffiti. Or are you oblivious to something called time, it creates this thing called a sequence of events. But you knew that because you're disingenuous, not stupid, right?
I don't know why everyone here is asking like investors and advertisers are completely oblivious and stupid. Most people don't just throw money at things without looking into it at all, particularly when it's their career. Advertisers absolutely care what their ads show up next to, the whole point of social media ads is targeting them to users with similar interests.
Having worked in the advertising business (on the tech side), I can assure you that the content is hugely important to the vast majority of brand advertisers. Somebody like P&G will not buy ads promoting their fabric softener in any place that will turn people away. Tucker Carlson's show lost advertisers even though it was the highest rated news show on TV.
Direct-response advertisers (like Google search advertisers, say) have a higher tolerance but will still restrict the hell out of their placements.
For example, go to a browser without ad block and search "Disney", you're gonna get an ad. But try, say, "Disney barf" or "Disney beer" or "Disney ugly" and those ads just disappear; they don't want to be associated with any negative valence.