Signal uses donations to keep running. That's one of the reasons why they don't need to do this kind of crap. Kinda like Firefox.
It's sad to see that slowly but surely the Internet gets divided into the more and more useless giant sector and the free and open sector, which just doesn't get the attention it needs to be attractive enough for most to switch over.
And then there's also this weird shadow area where I often hear those pirate chanties from...
I love the sound and view of a good trashfire, so I sometimes go look and see how hard it's burning.
So /r/madlads Mods did what madlads do: They made everyone a moderator just like /r/politicalhumor did from the beginning of the protest. I brought the idea up to the /r/pics mod just to let them know. Would be funny as hell.
Postwise, Bots started reposting content from 2-3 years ago, ChatGPT was spotted multiple times as a replying user and smaller subs returned to normal, but are slowly drowning in spambot posts or switched to approval-only due to the failing tools.
EDIT: A major antispambot on reddit closes down today by unbanning EVERY SINGLE SPAMBOT on reddit. Did I mention that I love watching things burn down?
To me it feels like the whole ordeal shook reddit quite a bit and made maybe the top 10% of the users drop out of the bucket this way, going to the Fediverse (flavors: lemmy, kbin, mastodon) as far as I can tell right now. Tildes and squabbles got some users, too, but IMHO those seem to be not doing well so far.
Damn, I didn't know that. Now I'm sad.