Part 2 of my reply, b/c I was slightly over the character limit and did not want to abandon anything, so here goes:

I do disagree with you on one point, however:

They probably rank content quality the same way as the others do

No, I am certain that they do not. Maybe in some ways interests can align, but brains are not like stomaches: most people across the world regardless of class, gender, education level etc. have fundamentally the same stomach organ (there is a particular notable ethnic aberration wrt ability to process milk, but other than that, they seem to all be the same?). However, people are not all at the same intellectual level, and moreover they do not even desire to be. A longer comment such as this one that I am writing now, I have literally receive spiteful (occasionally crossing the line over into outright hateful!) replies to when posted to Reddit - even if you and I explicitly agreed, in advance, to have that exact longer-form conversation together, the fact that it so much exists where their eyes can view it, even in a slightly older (several days) post, somehow offends them. I admit that I do not understand this to any degree - if you dislike something, why not just scroll down past it, especially now that Reddit makes that easier on the mobile app? HOW HARD IS IT TO WITH A SINGLE FLICK OF YOUR WRIST, MOVE PAST SOMETHING!? I have receive literal awards from the people I actually responded to, bubbling effusively at how grateful they were that I would take the time out of my day to type all of that out for their edification - sometimes I would include screenshots, often links to exact places to go for further detail, and describe in-depth how to arrive at that same location more easily in the future. And yet even with all that, even with the award having been displayed, even with the response already there - and as comments were sorted by New by default in one place I am thinking of, very prominently so - even then, they actively took time out of their day, to involve themselves in a conversation between other people, both of whom were enjoying themselves, to tell the one who was talking to STFU. To be clear, I’m not talking about this happening once or twice, I’m saying that it happened MORE OFTEN THEN IT DID NOT HAPPEN.

So your food analogy seems doubly flawed then, imho, b/c not only is their willingness to tolerate imbibing lower-quality content significantly lower, as you say rock-bottom, but they ALSO are actively hostile to a great sandwich even so much as existing. I wrote out several additional stories as further supporting evidence, but due to character limitations had to cut it, and hopefully you get what I am saying even without them (I will add this relevant link in case you are interested - even I am tired of shouting about it into a void that does not want to hear about it, but it is quite relevant to this topic). If this were to happen irl like as I visit a particular section of a city, then I would stop going there. Hence, with it happening so very often on Reddit, I finally stopped going there. (I need to sometimes though, like for official announcements, but I suspect I will be 99% more of a lurker than contributor from now on, and that ironically has nothing to do with spez’s emotional meltdown recently - that just woke me up to what has been going on for YEARS over there, as it turned from “discussion forum” to “social media” site.)

To them, they really, truly, honestly do believe that Reddit “was right to just quell the protest and stay their course”. After all, “first they came for X, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a X”.

Now, mind you, when Reddit eventually comes for THEM (maybe killing off old-Reddit, maybe they’ll need to ditch NSFW content in order to keep advertisers happy, moderation will be of noticeably lower quality, bots will be rampant, etc.), they will be shocked, shocked I tell you, SHOCKED (well, they shouldn’t be that shocked, imho:-), and probably even then they will agree with ~~daddy~~ spez that it is all the fault of those ~~hard-working volunteers~~ traitorous basturds who abandoned their communities for… (checks notes) “no (real) reason whatsoever”. Some, I should say, might be nice people… but nonetheless they will go along with it, “for the sake of peace”. Those who do not know their history must consistently be doomed to repeating it, and these days the word “collaborator” has no meaning whatsoever, since very few alive has had to live through the reality of what it means (although a Ukrainian might be able to shed some light on that point… and possibly, dare I say, even a handful of Russians whose entire families have already been killed for the glory of the motherland:-D).

Another point is that people should never have trusted Reddit to begin with. We could have been developing social media technology like this all along this whole entire time, at the very least giving Reddit the tiniest of competition. Tbf, the world didn’t know what it was like inside the “walled gardens” of Meta, Apple, Google (Don’t Be Evil), except for those of us who actually read books that predicted such things, sometimes hundreds of years in advance. HG Wells’ Time Machine springs to mind for some reason, with the whole underclass of humans as food animals and the real engineers having diverged into a literally different species (the exact opposite of what Homo sapiens did to neanderthals!:-P). There is nothing new under the sun - people who see far are able to do so b/c they see clear to the true hearts of men. OF COURSE Reddit was going to do this - it was inevitable, and always only a matter of time. Well, now we know, I suppose.