Even before the insane number of bots that are on reddit today, I believe that subreddit was one of the main ways for astroturf accounts to gain karma quickly. They knew that everyone was just there to look at happy things and would upvote heavily.

Back in the 90s there was an article about some “spam king” guy who was blasting out millions of emails and basically crushing mail servers and making inboxes useless. They interviewed him and he was all indignant about it like “I have the right to do this” and all that.

That is when I knew the internet and humanity was doomed from the start.

So....if dead internet theory has gone into effect, does that mean adverts are basically just a medium of wealth circulation between tech bros in a circle jerk?

I'd estimate as much as 50% of the entire community left on Reddit are bots. I've seen people being downvoted systemically, just for saying completely ordinary things that aren't even controversial.

autocorrect appears to have turned "wholesomememes" into "wholesomeness" in your title

Other than bots, who else is even still on Reddit...? :-P It's bots interacting with bots, all the way down.

Most of reddit seems to be bots posts now, or reddit employees. They shot themselves in the chest when they did their greedy deeds.

Oh no. Have they tried insulting their mods, taking away their perfectly fine moderation tools, replacing them with objectively worse advertisement-delivery-first apps and taunting everybody who disagrees with that decision before forcibly suppressing any protests and banning dissenting voices? Maybe that'll help making the sub attractive for content creators.

How do you even ban reposts though without mods constantly scanning the queue. Make the subreddit OC only?

Lol I feel like any big sub would see a similar drop in quantity.

Sadie to hear, I used to mod for that subreddit and i felt like I was making a difference. I haven't been a mod for years and haven't been on reddit in 2.

A meme is by definition a repost though. The reuse is literally what makes it a meme.

Could the same thing happen on the Fediverse? I mean could a community get overrun by bot posters without any actual humans posting? I'm not sure what the endgame of doing that would be.