Way longer than that. The rot was evident during 2015/2016 election cycle. Narrative crafting and political astroturfing for days. The last 5 years or show has just illustrated how unhinged the admins and mods of major subs are

Leftists? Censoring? No, comrade…it couldn’t be

Alex Karp bad

Real bots or NPC humans? Does it matter? Reddit is astroturf and narrative crafting central. It’s Pravda for zillennials

you have been banned from /r/politics for this post

/r/popular sucks so we’re going to feed you infinite slop forever like facebook

nice

What an idiot. Spez nuked his own website multiple times, the API stuff was just the last straw for many. LLM Bots, powertripping mods, astroturfing politicos, and brainbroken libs coalesced in a perfect tsunami of shit and killed whatever utility that website had in the past.