I don't generally go with the "Oh no, anyways..." comment, but that's truly how I feel about the whole Reddit drama at this point.
They made their bed, and now they have to lie in it. I have zero confidence they'll change, and even on the remote chance they wanted to, its pretty much too late for that.
I sort by hot and there's no comment activity. I sort by active and it's the same posts for the entire day. Maybe you see improvement, but I see mostly a bunch of people yelling into the wind and a few groups huddled in the few interesting topics like this one, which is ironically bitching about reddit.
There was a pretty big spike in activity after/during the blackout, but it settled down quite a lot. Especially if I look into my Everything feed, there's just tons of low effort content and repetition.
There are at least three communities that are solely Hackernews reposts, completely automated, hardly any interaction, but somehow still "hot".
Maybe it's just a phase, but I'm slightly skeptical right now.
Interesting voices that are active did break off of Reddit and make their way to Lemmy. Spez did the communities here a favor by reminding people that their engaging content, moderated by volunteers, was the product he was holding hostage.
They made their bed, and now they have to lie in it.
Only the bed they made is fairly cushy.
While the quality of content may have decreased, that's not how they make money. Like many modern tech companies, they make money from collecting data and serving ads, which they're presumably doing in droves since forcing their users into their first-party app.