The admins can push whatever stupid numbers they want. People were not somehow tricked into giving the site a second wind, by turning this desperate exploitation of a beloved icon into a vulgar billboard against the fucker selling us out, or by dumping all the soon-to-be-stolen awards onto comments asking what the fuck he thinks he's doing.

The nature of bad faith is that there is no right answer. Any response, including no response, will be twisted around and treated as victory, because the person being condemned for making shit up gets to make shit up. There are no circumstances where they don't go "Ah-HA!" There is no point scolding people for not doing the thing that would stop this, because that thing does not exist. People who care what's real just have to deal with it and act in spite of it.

Reddit has the worst per-user stats of any social media site, by an order of magnitude... and the bump in engagement here is bluntly saying it's time to leave.