This is what lack of competition in a given niche makes even possible. They can afford many explicitly anti user patterns because for a bunch of usages, they have no real alternative.
When I can no longer use old.reddit I will stop giving them the little usage time I still spend there.
> When I can no longer use old.reddit I will stop giving them the little usage time I still spend there.
This is definitely just a matter of time, they're slowly moving there by killing off things like `i.`. They'll lose a bunch of "us", but overall it's probably not going to affect their bottom line. Some specific high-quality discussion subreddits dying out means nothing if there are dozens of multi-million user subreddits with generic memes or TikTok-reposts.
When I can no longer use old.reddit I will stop giving them the little usage time I still spend there.