Skray

Reddit already fudges numbers although not to that extent. If you go to someone's page from their profile and downvote all their comments it won't actually count.

Exact upvotes and downvotes are also a little fluid, it'll give you a number within a range but not an exact amount depending on the amount of interaction on a post.

I don't think reddit will die, but they definitely hurt themselves. The fediverse grew by leaps and bounds over the past week, reddit drove so much traffic to their potential competitors. Then when the 3rd party apps die, they'll lose some more.

Reddit is gambling on gaining enough revenue from pushing people on 3rd party apps to 1st party that it makes up for the loss of users overall.

People on reddit say "Why do we care about 3rd party apps, it's such a small section of the userbase" But apparently reddit cares enough about that small section of the userbase that they need to push them to their own app.

I'm really enjoying Kbin as well. Ironically the people left on reddit are saying they're enjoying reddit more too with the blackout, as they're seeing smaller subreddits they used to not see, and the large subs filled with spam and reposts are mostly dark.

I think the lesson here is that reddit got too big for quality, which is ultimately what the admins want. Quantity over quality, more users to sell advertising too, and more users to sell their analytics.

/r/PathofExile announced they're locking themselves indefinitely. The mods have setup a Lemmy instance to replace the sub and are directing users there now.
There are a handful of others going dark indefinitely as well.