Lowering the quality of the content means that sure they’ll get a surge of viewers to see the ruins, but then people will leave sure to the lack of valuable content. This is the idea behind it. If Reddit is forcing to stop the blackout, the removing the content value is the next thing. Sure you can boycott, but the amount of people that land on a Reddit page from a SEO or don’t know/care about the blackout are still significant. If those people have no reason to get to a Reddit page then the damage to Reddit becomes critical.