No one’s saying to ignore it.
If I own and run a sandwich shop, I don’t need to be on the farm picking and processing the wheat to make the flour that goes into my bread. I could do that, but then I’d be a farmer, a miller, and a sandwich maker. All I need to know is that I have good quality flour or bread so that I can make damn good sandwiches.
It’s a cool experiment, but:
Over time, the negative feedback from these misfires has trained me to type more slowly and thoughtfully, burdening my mind with uncertainty that impedes my natural typing rhythm and unconscious flow of thoughts onto the computer screen.
I get using the modifiers as a potential accessibility solution. But if you’re otherwise able to type on the keyboard just fine, this is easily counterproductive.
In my opinion, any button in terms of graphical UI design simply dispatches an action with no arguments regarding state. There doesn’t exist a dichotomy between a “toggle” mechanic and a “standard” button as far as the button itself is concerned.
Whether or not you want to update the visual representation of that button is a separate concern.
You aren’t alone. I stopped posting to Reddit in the protest and haven’t posted/voted since, but old threads are just too useful to completely block it out.
The thing is, though, my Reddit usage from Google Search hasn’t replaced what used to be my time browsing Reddit. I now exclusively use it for informational old threads via Google Search.
If before API terms changes I spent 7 hours a week on Reddit, and let’s say 5% of that was needing Google search results from Reddit specifically and the other 95% of usage was scrolling through my Reddit front page; I am not now spending 7 hours on Reddit via Google search. I’m now only using that 5% of 7 hours/week = 21 minutes/week on Reddit, and maybe even less considering my newfound aversion to the website.
And I suspect that most of the people who stopped using Reddit after the changes—whether by lapse or by principle—are not gonna come crawling back to it if Reddit chooses to sever that tenuous metaphoric link.
Edit: clarified a subject
Hot take: the web should not be more human.
And I’m pretty progressive on technological matters. There should still be a clear separation, though.