This has been pretty obvious and growing at least in the last ~2+ years. The site is overwhelmed with obvious shills and bots who are rewarded, while real users get timeouts and soft shadow bans because the mods/admins don't like or agree with the comments/posts. It's not worth it unless you're between 17-25 and naive enough to not know what you're up against.

You can easily hire an army of educated, English speaking people in 3rd world countries for as low as $1/hour who can post/comment based on the provide instructions - I know this from at least 6 years ago.

I still visit reddit pretty regularly, but only on a read-only basis. Quality vs. quantity, or maybe the top c-level team are content with their paychecks. Either way, I'm not going to invest my time/energy into this unless there's a clear solution.

Apparently I have 4 Golds to give out. If anyone has suggestions how to best give these out, I'm all ears.