Publications like these lower reddit’s future valuations though. I’m not sure whether a two-day uptick in users is worth that. My guess would be that it’s not.
This is what I see as the true value of these "protest" messages above just "more user engagement" since it seems like more eyes on negative press does more damage than the plus of "a few more users interacted with our site for a few days"
Agreed. People keep saying that investors can be bamboozled by numbers of any kind, because they are not familiar with Reddit, because they don’t understand the technology, etc etc, but investors do know how to read, and a lot of them also know how to read the room. They might be rich scumbags who don’t understand the internet, but I am willing to bet that a lot of people who might be interested in buying Reddit understand people, and therefore, understand that you can’t run a business that defines itself as an online community when you have pissed off a whole lot of the people who make up that community.
And I wish they did. With all the „fuck spez“ and 3rd party app grief, people do surprisingly little to improve the current situation and link to Reddit alternatives.
Continued protests could drive other users away. If they think the content sucks or is annoying, they'll check the site less and that'll affect reddit.