Reddit must have some mechanism specifically for non-spamming bots that isn’t covered in this article. I wonder how it works. I imagine the mechanisms are more complex and opaque than anti-spam (with various levels being exposed to the hierarchies of Reddit and government backdoors). These days, I’ve noticed an almost forcing-function that operates to put the minimum spin needed on posts and comments to turn signal to noise. It seems smart enough to not only generate noisy comments but create comments to amplify existing organic noisy comments. I’m sure these systems are decentralized, emergent, and split across numerous nation-states and actors. I’m also fairly certain what we have now is a tenuous balance that has emerged from all these actors and Reddit policing actions as well.

I imagine Reddit has a high-level of insight into this and a certain level of permissibility it grants, both to inflate user counts and to steer public discourse and insight into less productive mean (or productive to certain interest groups at the expense of the people). I think is also an effect that Reddit has become more global and consensus of the USA people is very antagonistic to the consensus of the people of the world so that doesn’t help (+ access to LLMs to make English writing no longer a barrier to entry).