Excerpt:
Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago. This suggests the problem is way fewer users, not the same number of users browsing less. The huge and universal dropoff also suggests that people left, either because of the changes or the protests, and they aren’t coming back.
If you’re trying to sneakily manipulate karma and content, you don’t want to be doing it through the API, you want it to look like legitimate users so it doesn’t get blocked. This usually means some kind of browser automation.
Of course, reddit does so little to combat it, maybe there really were sleazy astro-turfing botnets just accessing the site through the API.
Back in like 2018, reddit posted some user stats, including a list of “most addicted cities”. They forgot to scrub the results and Eglin Airforce Base was the top rank.
The fact that it wasn’t blocked implies reddit admins are OK with the airforce’s botfarm, and would allow them to use the API.
Yeah I don’t really know. Something else that could have happened is that Subreddit Stats just stopped reporting the counts correctly because they rely on the API.