Interesting. The comments are now lagging well below normal. Here's a screenshot from the blackout tracker. The red arrow shows how reddit is still spamming lots of new posts, but comments are much lower than usual. Normally, at the peak times, comments are at or even above the number of posts. Not today though.
Yep. Expecting a lot of bot comments on bot reposts that are just copied portions of top comments on previous versions of that repost.
It had gotten to the point where I didn’t feel confident upvoting much at all anymore, because so many posts were automated content, and worse, more and more comments were just bots stealing contributions made elsewhere (or even further down in the same post) by actual people.
It’s only going to get worse now.
I really hope the fediverse is able to do something to safeguard against all that. Because if it’s not already testing the locks, it’s coming.
Since the source graph gets wonky immediately before the crop, there's not really enough here to compare against from the before-times (last week).
But what is here looks like a very large problem on the comment front, with each peak being lower than the last and and the latter two nadirs following the same pattern. The presumed "small number of power users" were having a noticeable impact more than 48 hours earlier. (and, hey ... good on them for using 0 as the axis)