reddit got bad because spez (the reddit admin) restricted API access to the platform for third-party apps, such that people would be forced to use the official app or web UI, both of which display advertisement and collect user data (e.g. scroll behavior).

the reason why this happened is because reddit is a for-profit company and tries to extract money out of the userbase, at the expense of the users.

another example of a bad decision that reddit made was to push a lot of ragebait ("Am I The Asshole?") because company shareholders want to see "engagement numbers" go up, and if somebody writes an angry reply to a post, that's "engagement". but it makes you angry at the stupidity of the "Asshole", so it makes your day worse. that is another example how reddit makes money at the expense of the users.

size (number of monthly active users) is not what made reddit bad. commercialization is.

we should probably get rid of the "don't make lemmy grow, it will ruin the platform if we grow" idea.

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[–] Saarth@lemmy.world 1 points 37 minutes ago* (last edited 36 minutes ago)

The accounts posting fake product reviews to promote products are usually not bots. They are either actual people from ad agencies/brands, posting as a part of the campaign and other people from the agency upvoting (sometime also using engagement farms).

I don't know how much activity on reddit is bot driven, but logically it makes little sense to me to run bot campaigns there. Until 2020, reddit was quite small and insignificant in terms of how many people you could reach. And now, reddit has made their API increasingly more expensive, making it prohibitive for large scale bot posting. Even scraping data is hard and very expensive, let alone posting at scale.

There might be engagement farms and content farms mass posting, but that is manual, not bots, and happens on all social media platforms.