Before the API change I was looking into making an extension for RES that would automatically block any user account above a configurable ratio of posts to comments. It was BANANAS how much content was from bots on the front page even on smaller subs, and that was before the protests.
That would have been a lot like how I remember message boards being back in the day, (late 90's early 2000's) and honestly I don't think I like it. People like me (with both low number of comments and posts) wouldn't be able to reach that bar to entry. I get the bots wouldn't either, but that still eliminates human users as well and I don't know if that's a good thing.
They counted comments and the number of upvotes (or what have you) in an attempt to stop trolls and bad actors. If you didn't have enough comments you couldn't post anything to the message boards and therefore could really engage with the message oars above a certain level. I remember that some also used to limit the number of comments any one user account could make per day, especially new users. It's been 20 years or more at this point and I don't remember those blogs or message boards, honestly.
Where was this? I was on at least 10 different message boards, most of them extremely large, including something awful, and nothing had what you're talking about.
Reddit sold whatever soul it may have had to the devil, as does every company that goes public.
It's literally taking our words and our conversations and using them to train an inhuman computer system to sound more human.
And we are not allowed to say no.
It doesn't get more devilish than that on the internet.
And of course, I deleted my account when this whole debacle happened, but I'm sure they're still taking all of my old comments and selling them to any person with a dollar.