i find myself spending WAAAAAY more time on reddit as an unregistered lurker than a contributing user on the entire fediverse combined due to the lack of content.
what are some easy things i can do to make sure that my surfing doesn’t benefit reddit or any other site?
Use a privacy hardened browser over tor / vpn with an ad blocker.
That’s really all you can do. And they’ll STILL get some value from you, as they’ll use your activity to inflate their page view statistics.