God, post-digg era was peak. When subs like r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu were still active. It was just folks talking about their lives and relating to eachother. Then we all grew up, life got serious, and the culture wars started.

It’s two things. Bots, yes, but also the communities have gotten really lazy. Shit was fire during peak culture war because people were actively trying to learn. Now it’s like everyone gave up.

It’s always been the goal to get children consuming products. It’s a known function of humans that they usually stick to whatever they were doing when they were kids well into adulthood. It’s harder to convince an adult with pre-established routines and preferred products to switch over.

You’re right though that it’s getting pretty blatant now, but that’s to be expected as we dismantle food and drug regulations.

“Has the largest” meaning a 3 comment average per thread. That’s what the OC is talking about. The communities in Lemmy World are really small in a way that makes it hard to hold together a sub. A new movie comes out and maybe one or two people talk about it on Lemmy while Reddit has hundreds.

Then you might say, be the change you want to see, but Lemmy has a pretty small install base. Even if you participate, there isn’t anyone to follow, because the users here are usually white collar tech folk. Hence the interest groups being tech and politics.