I guess there's the idea that all press is good press. People who didn't know reddit existed now likely do and they might just check it out to see what the hullabaloo is about. They might not even be internet savvy enough to suspect bot conversations are a real thing.

It's a website that gets paid in traffic, and we're giving people a reason to continue being traffic, and potentially increasing their traffic. We just fed the machine.

The best thing we can do is just stop using it. Making the protests fun is only going to help reddit. They're not negotiating, they've made their decision already, they're not going to back down on it and even if they did some decisions have consequences.