I might get “cancelled” for this, but hear me out:
If you remove your account bad actors won’t be able to identify you unless they put in the effort. Reddit staff will revert popular comments and posts to the way they were before the Blackout. Mass-scrambling your posts and comments with a “f*ck Spez”, followed by a long chain of "A"s or whatever, annoys people who are just trying to find an answer to something on Reddit, and it doesn’t help anybody except the user’s feelings.
The preservation of information comes above some moral feeling.
Your opinion?
On the other hand, it makes spammy articles from content farms the primary resource to find answers.
And either way, not everybody is doing this, so Reddit retains part of its usability, which still exists, and some portion of people will still use Reddit after the API changes.
I didn’t choose any of this. Reddit made the first move. Maybe Steve Huffman should consider second-order consequences.
Or it forces search providers to actually fix their shit rather than relying on our labor.