It seems that activity in Reddit was considerably slower around the 1st of July, by roughly 1.5k comments per minute. (For reference: the platform usually has between 8k and 3k comments per minute.)
I wonder if there’s some way to measure their quality too, as I predict that it dropped harder than the amount.
When it comes to the decrease in quality, I guess some of the dropped activity will have been bot activity as well.
Not sure if that will be a smaller or bigger part. I guess the app users/power users they’re pushing away will be more valuable than random lurkers.
It’s possible. But bots always find a way, specially spam bots; if they can’t get API access they’ll do it another way, for example pretending “I’m a legit user using a legit browser, let me post”.