The majority aren‘t bots. Most of them are legit no lifers to whom Reddit going down the drain would be a huge blow. I mean you work full time as a cashier for taco bell and you are not really happy with that situation. Some people go to school again, learn a skill… others spend all their time one Reddit stockpiling karma. Those are the people who really hate lemmy and anything that could remotely make Reddit worse, because they are heavily invested in the platform for the wrong reasons.
I don’t really get how people think Reddit
is winning. Sure traffic is back to normal or even higher, but that really doesn’t matter. They want to go public and for that to work they have to be lucrative for advertisers.
No one in their right mind wants to advertise like normal on current Reddit. Sure they still have users but now you advertisements are not targeted and you basically advertise on a shitpost site.
From a money perspective this is a huge problem for Reddit because for a investor in the current market situation that is not rly something you want to invest in. Remember it is a forum that hasn’t made a profit in nearly 20 years and a relevant percentage (active posters) of the userbase is trolling right now.
It currently looks like a lose lose situation (Reddit and the users don‘t get what they want).