The last major holdouts in the protest against Reddit’s API pricing relented, abandoning the so-called “John Oliver rules” which only allowed posts featuring the TV host. It's the official end of the battle. The Reddit protest is over, and Reddit won.
Tanked reputation, loyal user base gone like the window, no 3rd party support what so ever and the face of the company making a total ass out of himself. Yeah sure, if you call that a ‘win’
They still have a lot of traffic. So yeah, they did win.
But you know who else won? The Fediverse. This place feels really active now and has the added benefit of feeling just a bit more wholesome.
Between the loss of original content and the genuinely obscure/questionable shit now dominating r/all, I’m pretty sure they’ve backfilled their DAU losses with bots.
I’d go one step further and allege it’s a deliberate scheme, because if repost and content bots are running it’s because they have unhindered access to API calls, and that comes from admin. Also, Reddit can actually analyze their traffic and know far better than we can what is likely human and what is likely bot, and use that to try to better hide the authorized bot traffic.
So yeah, they may well have traffic, but I would put money on some unknown yet significant portion of that traffic not being human, as a deliberate strategy to retain advertisers.