why-so-serious

That's completely speculative, plus those are not the KPIs that the business gives a shit about, in terms of engagement oriented revenue. Advertisers care about impressions, and unique users, and that's it and I would bet your childrens' lives, that both have seen a statistically significant hit.

>Would it be feasible to clone Reddit (the site) and populate it with content scraped directly from Reddit?

Lol, no; this is why I rarely worry about developers encroaching on operations concerns. A completely trustworthy site (https://backlinko.com/reddit-users#how-many-comments-are-pub...) states that that reddit had 303 million posts and 2 billion comments, in 2020. Could you imagine, how long it would take, and how much you would need to spend, on compute, to scrape 5+ million comments a day, using something like Selenium? I am guessing that it's a number approaching infinity. Plus, they would figure it out and just shut you down.