It's more popular because the amount of absolute horseshit people are willing to wade through to get their fix of social media stuff is insane.

Reddit could replace half of the links with gruesome ISIS beheading videos and people would probably just keep scrolling. Only something like a third of all web users even have an ad blocker.

>Reddit could replace half of the links with gruesome ISIS beheading videos and people would probably just keep scrolling

That would absolutely increase engagement.

>Only something like a third of all web users even have an ad blocker.

That's actually way higher than I thought...

To the extent that whole subreddits are deliberately broken (no comments load, or the "open in app" bar covers the "next page" button) in the mobile web version, and that's when they're not labelling everything that's not Teletubbies as NSFW and denying mobile access except via the app.