Going dark fulfills a whole bunch of objectives, filling up with trash is one of them, it’s fewer eyes seeing ads because less content keeping people scrolling, people subbed to subreddits that went dark are getting a stream of messages saying the execs at reddit fucked up and are providing alternatives like discord and Lemmy, and anyone who even dabbled with fediverse relates stuff like mastodon are getting messages and emails capitalizing on the mass Exodus saying hey come to lemmy, we’re like reddit but decentralized.