Sorry I’m not picking on you specifically, but every post about Reddit or r/place has someone saying something like “just leave” “any engagement helps them”, etc.

I think that’s exactly what they want.

They want the intelligent-but-cynical, hard-to-influence, infamously difficult-to-monetise dissenting mob to fuck off elsewhere, and leave them with the doomscrolling, passive users who are willing to use their app and happy to just look at whatever content is in front of them as long as sometimes there is a kitty.

The problem we have is that that mob of vocal users isn’t everybody. It probably isn’t even most users. I think they’d willingly lose us if it means the dissent goes with us.

So I don’t think this negative engagement is necessarily bad - it keeps their mismanagement in the news, and it opens users eyes to alternatives. And for me, that is the goal - to bring some of those awesome communities over to federated alternatives where no one corporate entity can take it away.

Plus it’s certainly going to be amusing if their flagship community engagement event (the output of which has been widely shared by the media in the past) has a giant “fuck spez” banner in it.