I see what you're saying, yeah, and I don't think you're wrong. It's just that this creates a strong visual of how fucked the site is, that there's such a massive show of resentment. Like, making a bunch of negative comments is one thing, but it's easy to miss or obscure. The place image is so unmissably clear that it has to do more damage to reddit than good.
Plus even if this short term bump helps, I don't think the reddit situation is really salvageable long term. Like user engagement is going to go down over time as they realise how bad it is to browse communities that are poorly moderated and losing submissions. If the place stunt is enough to make a real difference to metrics then those metrics are already permanently hosed.
