Maybe Reddit will make up for it with all the traffic coming from bots.

The argument would be that they provide " higher quality, more targeted views" which is probably correct.

Most people will fold and get the account, what's one more " sign in with Google" on top of the 1000 other accounts.

Sad thing ad networks will perceive it to be better since they better tie tracking between networks and thus better impressions. Don't matter to me though I just recently gone the next step of filtering Readit out of my search results and have never been happier.

Surveillance capitalism follows the same rules as capitalism; do whatever is most profitable. The deception/manipulation/propaganda algos are 10-1000x more valuable when they're able to target you as an individual; across all accounts, space, and time. The users hardest to swindle, who already gave a shit about privacy/anonymity, have already left.

Most advertising on reddit is guerrilla marketing, and reddit either runs their own bots or explicitly enables them to inflate activity and engagement.

Don’t worry, they have all the data on that, and I’m pretty sure they thought of it.

Fact is that most visits from search engines don’t go very deep anyway. They are allowing a brief glimpse at one page before they start prompting you to log in, and that is likely driving logins while barely shortening those SEO visits, which are not of great value in the first place.

It may come as a surprise but websites often have traffic they don’t want. I recall once my boss noticed there was a non-negligible amount of traffic from parts of the world none of our advertisers care about. He built an endless revolving door of promo offers and directed this traffic into it. It didn’t generate much money but it made the rest of our traffic look higher quality right away.

spez just wants to give it to AI companies to scrape for a fee, they already charge 60mil/year to let google have the data.