Reddit’s product is the ad sell on their site. People visit the site because of the user generated content. If you’re interacting with other users on Reddit, you’re still contributing to the company’s income.

I’m assuming they don’t charge advertisers for blocked ads, but you never know.

It’s a bit abstract, but yes your still generating revenue for Reddit, just not directly. Commenting provides content and engagement for other users who are directly monetized. Basically, your helping encourage people to stay on reddit, and their eyeballs to stay on ads. Even without commenting, just going to reddit provides them traffic, and that traffic is understood to be actual and potential monetization (there’s a lot of lazy chrome users who’s ad blockers are about to go away but won’t be bothered to switch to Firefox), which will inevitably be shown to investors during the IPO process. Just your traffic is helping to boost the IPO price.

All that said, your just one user in a sea of millions. Does just you engaging with Reddit (or not) effect their bottom line? Not at all. But there’s probably hundreds of thousands of people just like you asking the same questions and having the same dilemma. If all of you just stopped using Reddit, yes that would have an impact. It’s like climate change, if you drive to work that’s not going to cause the climate to collapse, but if you and hundreds of thousands or millions started taking public transit, that would definitely have an impact. So do you drive to work or take the bus? Do you wait for everyone else to start taking the bus and your city to improve the transit infrastructure first? Or do you just decide for yourself that you’ll make the first move and hope others follow.

I’m in no position to tell you what to do. I’m kind of over reddit anyway, being on Lemmy/kbin since the blackout made me realize how toxic reddit is, and anytime I happen upon a thread someone shares with me now I cringe at the vitriol and self-righteousness in the comments. So you do what makes sense for you. But yeah, your helping them if you go there and especially if you engage by commenting. But whatever, do with that information what you want.

It is speculated that Reddit is selling all of its users data to train large language models (AI). The exorbitant API fees are just slated to be the collection method, so in a sense you’re contributing to them still by providing valuable training data.

As far as getting hate for it goes, most people probably don’t care one way or another. There may be a subset of people that do, but don’t let it get to you.

Thank you everyone. I’m humbled. It’s just that reddit has been a daily routine for me for years, and giving up RIF was relatively easy compared to desktop browsing, but I suppose now is better than never.

they don’t get ad revenue from you, they get it from the firms they will be selling your data to. If you are commenting and you have a profile then whatever info they have or can guess about your demographic will be monetized.

I recommend using reddit without an account, since account provides more trackable data for Reddit. To get around subscriptions use a multisubreddit link on reddit, and on mobile use something like Stealth that lets you have a reddit feed without an account or RSS.

Don’t provide content. Most of reddit’s value is from search results, and the more niche and obscure a sub the more reddit comes up in the top search results for those topics. People really underestimated how much value niche subs provide and continued to be involved with the community telling themselves they are too small to matter.

But, it’s the niche ones that are the hardest to replace than the popular ones.

Yup, it does. It does because you give them content that others want to see (presumably), and Reddit earns money by showing other people your content wrapped with ads.

If you are logged in they still have access to your activity and usage statistics which they can sell to third parties.

So it’s true that you are not ‘directly’ generating profit for them in an easily measurable way, and they would consider you among the ‘freeloaders’ that they called all third party app users.

However, you still indirectly benefit them just by using the platform. Especially if you leave comments or post content. If you just use it, lurk at most and come to lemmy for the discussions.

Reddit is nothing without its, users, communities and content. They might not make any money out of you (if we ignore them training AIs or selling your data), but by posting and commenting you’re part of the reason why people whom they directly profit from keep using the site.