I used to be in ad tech, and I did the same thing. I didn't use an ad blocker so that I could understand what the users were seeing.

A few years in though, it started to get bad enough that I enabled the ad blocker on my personal stuff and kept a browser session for work where the ad blocker was off.

A real empathy would be advocating for adblocks and installing on all your acquaintance that would not know better.

As a user I have Adblock. Go for it

I see. But then you continue to willfully see ads after you left Reddit. I presume you viewed ads everywhere not just on Reddit?

Still strikes me as absolutely bizarre to do this. On one hand it’s commendable that you’d like to empathize with users, but on the other hand you’re working at Reddit who earns revenue by glueing people to their endless feed of ads. Expecting anything else is foolish.