How good of a job are they doing at advertising? Advertising is tough since it has to satisfy both the ad buyers and the users. It’s very easy to turn off one or the other side.
I started enjoying Reddit when I unsubscribed from all subreddits, i.e. having 0 subscriptions. What I did instead was to group all of them in various private multireddits inspired by USENET, so I have comp, emacs, langlearn, laugh, etc. Thus when I'm just checking to see if a notification I'm expecting is there, there is no links that can immediately distract me on the front page. This saves me countless hours, and combined w/ opting out of all personalisation [1], of the new profile overview and of the fuckup^H^H^H^H^H^Hredesign, and with strict JS and content blocking, and Redirector extension, it becomes bearable.
One thing Reddit should note is that people are there for the communities. If there was sth. identical but run by a foundation or NGO, I'd jump there and delete my reddit account once the important communities are migrated.
Ditto for me too, and I only keep an eye on 2 subreddits: /r/baltimore and /r/maryland, so I have no idea why they're targeting me with that ad. Maybe it's because general news headlines can be grim? However they're doing it, it's not done well.