Which is why it's garbage these days.

Not even a site for internet nerds anymore.

Reddit isn’t for me any longer, when they break old.reddit.com I’m done with it, I go weeks without commenting as it is.

yeah I thought it was going to break during the API scandal and ended up quitting then. I noticed an immediate improvement in my day to day mood when I wasn't consuming rage/cringe/sorrow bait.

It DID break.

A significant amount of the current content is literally bots posting old threads! Whether those bots are run by reddit itself or unaffiliated parties I don't know, but they are there, on most threads, including some threads that are ONLY bots reposting a 3 year old thread that did well, verbatim.

My tinfoil hat theory is that all the "Explain this (very obvious) joke to me" subreddits are trying to create training data for some AI and that a significant amount of the content that makes it to the front page is designed to elicit "Good Training Data" for whatever AI company they sold the rights to.

Everyone ads reddit to their searches to get human generated information these days. Not sure if that's still a guarantee, but it's a funny irony IRT what this thread is about...

My perception is that the site is horrifically partisan and punishing for average users.

The key is to not mistake your social circle with "normal".

Truth be told, according to stats, 90+% of the people barely post anything, if at all. To experience the horrific moderation, you need to get actively involved. Otherwise, the site looks like organic consensus, when you don't see the deleted posts and people who got disappeared or driven away.

My dangerous question.... how much of those 'visits' are AI bot crawlers?

Based on their other behavior, it wouldn't surprise me if Reddit both used crawler hits to pump up numbers while decrying AI bots and doing things that broke long-standing community tooling and apps....