A way that those suckers still stuck in that shithole could fight against this spam from within Reddit would be hostility. Basically: if someone mentions a brand, you tell them to sod off, call them a spammer, associate the brand with dead children, etc. Then the smart move from the advertisers' side would be to avoid being mentioned in Reddit.
Of course the suckers won't do it though. Any Reddit user with a shred of self-respect and willingness to fight against the sorry state of the platform already left it. Or at most interact with it passively.
It's less that it was the target of mockery and more like the target of whining. Like, "waaaaaaahh they mentioned r/hailcorporate again! This hurts my fee fees!". With then bootlicking mods using automod to filter out mentions of that sub.
Case in point yes, you're right that it would be even less feasible now than it was before.
About like 0.5% Max actually stopped using Reddit.
It isn't just people who stopped using it completely; it's also people who were active there, and after the events started simply lurking. I believe that quite a bit of people did this (way more than the 0.5% who left), and that this is mostly overshadowed by the surge of bot content there.
And even if only 0.5% did something different, it means 99.5% fit what I said in the second paragraph.
Cool... Cool... So they own one of the last places on the entire internet where you can find honest and accurate product reviews, and a place where you can find those reviews on just about every type of product you can think of, and instead of leaning into that, they're actively going to nuke it for the sake of short term profits?
I don't think anyone ever accused the corporate board of Reddit of being the sharpest knives in the drawer, but they're out here looking like a bunch of fucking spoons.