If I go on the reddit website and scroll through posts without doing anything else, would that affect Reddit's ad revenue, or is it insignificant to Reddit?

A lot of people are incorrectly obsessing over Reddit's revenue

A social media platform IPO valuation is based on a speculative value... A "reasonable prediction of potential value", and that is driven primarily by traffic and engagement metrics.

So, unfortunately, even a "read only with blocked ads" interaction w/ Reddit would still be helping Bost IPO value.

Is there anyway to check up on the protests without helping Reddit?
- It depends on how strictly you want to define "helping Reddit".
  
  If you have a very strict definition: then you probably shouldn't access Reddit at all in any way. Ive heard references to some sites that are tracking Reddit protests, but haven't seen them myself. If they've aggregated protest data you could try and find/use them as a source.
  
  Recognizing that although any access to Reddit is helping them, you're still a drop in the bucket... Simply limiting you time/engagement to a bare minimum still reduces any value you are providing to Reddit. Along with what others are saying: use a VPN, don't sign in, use an ad blocker. You can minimize your value in that way. But it won't be zero.
Spez has been correctly advised that investors are going to be concerned with profitability, or at least a viable pathway to profitability.

There’s a huge startup bubble starting to burst. Companies reliant on cheap money to supplement a business model that at best is years away from profitability but in some cases decades or will never be profitable.

Uber and Doordash IPO’d when money was cheap and investors were fine with speculating on these disruptive, yet unprofitable, companies.

I work broadly in the VC funded start-up world. My observation is that money is running out. All of these companies are trying to commercialize, even if the product isn’t fully ready, because they have to show revenue and there has to be a path to profitability of that revenue. That’s the only way they’ll get more money.

In this context, Reddit is more like these startups. They’ve been funded by investors, including big ones like Condé Nast and Ten Cent, and they need more money, so they have to show a path to profitable revenue.

The IPO is going to be a shit show. I wouldn’t touch it with a 9 foot pole. Reddit has been notoriously unprofitable for its entire existence. Now there’s no more juice to squeeze and their backers want to pawn it off on retail investors.
- It is for sure going to be a shitshow.
  
  Even if we want to talk about the IPO in the context of profitability, spez' decisions are still pretty bad.
  
  Forget revenue for a second and look at expenses. Reddit has had a long chain of extremely foolish expensive endeavours. They keep investing dev effort into things like snoovatars, becoming a content host (images videos), trying to roll thier own video player, creating "spaces" which failed miserably. The resistance to even using their new UX is very high, old.reddit still is in massive use simply because their new UX isn't very good.
  
  Reddit has been obsessed with throwing money away on things that aren't making them any money, and aren't driving site traffic or engagement.
  
  The clearest path to profitability for Reddit isn't about trying to invent notional revenue with an API pricing structure that nobody will actually pay for... But instead simply stopping spending money on pointless development.
  
  In fact, I think this whole stunt will have backfired in the sense that if he hadn't made this API pricing mistake, IPO investors may have believed it was an opportunity for improved revenue. I expect that when the dust settles, spez will have instead proven that it ISN'T a significant untapped opportunity to be had.
- It all hinges on how much bot activity the SEC will allow them to pass off as legitimate.
Permanently Deleted

I can understand the interest in watching the drama unfold. It’s like reality tv.

But you should also ask yourself, deep down, why do you care?

Reddit will never go back. It was going downhill long before the 3PA-crisis. Spez will never back down. Even if Spez gets fired it’ll be an Ellen Pao situation all over again. The new CEO will say nice things and then not undo anything Spez did.

At this point the most anyone left on Reddit can do is damage Reddit’s valuation. It’s retribution for destroying the community we all enjoyed.

The mods can do this by impacting what subs can be monetized. Users can do this by decreasing traffic. Even being on the site is traffic.

It's not about watching the drama unfold. It's about watching the tiger die.

Imagine a movie with a powerful villain. Now, imagine that the movie just ends without us seeing the death scene. We just know about it due to the directors confirming it. Imagine Scar running away from the hyenas and the movie just ending with the text 'Scar was killed by the hyenas later on.' It would be mich better to see Scar getting killed, right?

That's why I want to go on Reddit. Not for hopes for Reddit's redemption, but to watch Reddit die in a blaze of stupidity.
Your comment is spot on, and it's what led me to ultimately cutting bait entirely, after 12 years of heavy daily use: it's never coming back to what I remember it as.

Reddit is certainly not going to die anything -- the website itself will likely be around 10 years from now -- but it won't be the reddit I remember or loved. So I moved on. I toyed around with Squabbles for awhile but this feels much more like the reddit experience I'm looking for.

Unfortunately you still generate traffic and see the ads

Use libreddit, a privacy preserving front end for reddit.

https://l.opnxng.com/r/modcoord

If you use an ad blocker, they won’t gain anything but data from you.

If you sign out, and use a VPN then they get just about nothing.

You’d still count as a user though. That goes into their IPO valuation. Don’t go to reddit period.
I have deleted my account bur have not been using a VPN.
They will still get site visit counts and other general metrics (page view time, clicks, etc.). When you see in a press release that they, "have X million daily page views," that's including everything from signed in users to anonymizing middle clients, like libreddit.

It's the most minimal help for them possible, but not as good as just staying away. If you used to post regularly and scanning the front page twice per day will help you engage less, that's much better than slipping back into old habits.

You can replace reddit.com with reddit.adminforge.de, so say instead of reddit.com/r/ModCoord --> go to reddit.adminforge.de/r/ModCoord

You can scroll your little heart away without giving reddit any traffic

If they get paid based on impressions rather than clicks, then even browsing would help them.