Compounded by it being mostly bots doing that.

Reddit is astroturfed from day 1. By that I mean they literally faked it until they made it as in the early days Reddit was 100% consisted of sock puppets, whose activity convinced outside people to join.

"I bought a brand today!"

"Woah! So did I!"

"I'm so happy this brand has made my life!"

"Yeah! So it has mine!"

Fucking riveting stuff there.

or eat where the communal toilet is.

If you've been at Reddit for a while, you recognize all those blantant bot-driven reposts. It's really something. The same old screenshot of some tweet being reposted hundreds of times. The same questions in /r/askreddit with the same old answers. Memes that are repeating on a fixed schedule. The same ragebait content enraging the second generation of a family.

You can see where the AI bots have taken over - entire comment chains where old reddit tropes are just passed back and forth without any real context, critique, humor, or understanding.

That just sounds like the typical askreddit comment section for the past decade, ngl

they also lost a ton of traffic i believe too, AI slop posting and reposting, prop bots, and your spammers have mostly taken over most subs.

im betting those brief comments you mentioned are just the spammers "warming up thier accounts"as to not get banned by reddit filters, they dont contribute anymore than that. im in another forum where they discuss how to warm up thier accounts this way. also propaganda bots do it too.

i to noticed multiple post of the same thing on the front page, if its political or a news worthy, it would be up to 4-5 times on the front page alone, also likely by the same poster. and then alot of the"interesting type subs" are also double/triple posting some clearly AI generated videos.

I’ve noticed the same thing. I was a long time user of Reddit. Practically obsessed over it at times. But after noticing how toxic and just plain stupid it’s gotten lately, I’ve almost completely left it. I don’t even have an account anymore. I think the final straw for me was a video of a kid allegedly being a little shit towards an older woman, so this woman’s husband started hitting the kid. And then another guy came and slapped the kid. And the majority of commenters were on the side of the adults hitting a child clearly under 12 years old. No use being on it anymore when it’s clearly just a rage machine now.

The plan is to artificially inflate the number of users with bots to fool advertisers into thinking there are a lot more users than there really is so they'll advertise on Reddit. This is the only thing that matters now.

In the long term. In the short term, spez makes a lot of money.

I think they got all they needed from us. It doesn't matter what they do now. They sold years of conversations and information.

Remember when we used to write "redit" after a web search to ensure we got some authentic conversation related to the query?

The fediverse will never have SEO like that, but I am gradually finding increasingly niche topics discussed here, or else I start a discussion with them.

also notice how many posts get double or triple posted, any trump related(breaking news) get 5-6 posted at once.

Same. Ditched my account during the API nonsense, but I still lurked occasionally on old.reddit. When they made that require a login, stopped going to reddit entirely. Which leaves this place as the last social media I interact with. I'm expecting some kinda ban on the fediverse in my country, just cause that seems par for this course. Then I dunno, give up on the internet? It's half bots now anyway.

Advertising on reddit was always a dumb move from the get go. They had to disable comments on ads because they didn't want people actually discussing products openly and freely. It was such a farce.