Comment by johnnyanmac

>Perhaps moderators and users should be willing to admit that Reddit produces some of the value here.

Sure, there's a lot of spam and other things that Reddit will do in the background, so it makes sense that reddit does SOMETHING.

But that's not really what the protest is about. And the 3rd party app controls are simply the breaking point instead of a sudden crack in the community. To use your example: MS and Adobe would be in their own ivory towers, but were set on making several user centric changes while doing their own version of a squeeze. Every CS update and uhh, most major Windows updates would come with some big features that benefited the user amongst the inevtiable ads, subscription models, and all the other stuff people dread in modern software. The continue to improve and never rested on their laurels.

Reddit on the other hand, has been full of broken promises, features that were not desired, and a bunch of drama on the admin level that would get any other mod banned. I don't think someone who quit in 2015 who tried out reddit in 2023 would notice a signifigant improvement. Images and videos are built-in now, but with worse, more limited services than Youtube or Imgur. Flairs have gotten a tiny better but still are just very hacked-in search query links in reality. You can filter subs from r/all now, which came as a result of a huge drama instead of an apparent willingness to support the user (good lesson that Mods leaned for now. You need to be loud if you want Reddit to listen).

>for a free product their ads are among the least intrusive I can think of.

of course, much more effective to "natively advertise" through thinly veiled bots that Reddit does not enough about.