Nothing. Social media (and social-ish media like Reddit) have a strong, strong hold on people. Facebook is still an incredibly popular site. People don’t abandon social media sites until they literally have to, like in the instance of MySpace, vine. A company definitely contributes to that by tanking their own UI and making people leave, which in turn causes a downward spiral of the company grabbing on harder to the dwindling user base, trying to monetize them harder and harder, until they company itself bottoms out and shuts down the servers.

Those of us that left Reddit willingly when we were tired of being used by them are in the very small minority. They lost, what, like 1-2% of their user base when nearly every single comment in any thread about the API debacle that said, “this is the last straw, I’m leaving and deleting my comment history” was getting massive amounts of support? People on the internet talk a big game, but ultimately are hopelessly addicted to their routines.

This is all by design, of course. We’re conditioned to open their apps and sites by reflex when we turn on the phone or computer. It fuckin works. But dammit if it doesn’t feel good breaking that spell. But it’s super disappointing others are willing to take every slap to the face and simply say “thank you sir may I have another.” Those people contribute to enshittification as much as the companies, honestly.

They think that the entire reason the Internet exists is to sell things. To make you want to buy things. And if you tell them it’s not, they laugh.

All true, and I hate it too