I used to be torn on this conspiracy theory, but I just accept it at this point. It's pretty clear that a huge number of comments on sites like Reddit are if not bots, paid for spam/manipulation. The amount humans, let alone people commenting in good faith is so low as to not make it worth engaging.

There's too much for bad actors and companies to gain, there's no way they're leaving this kind of opportunity on the table, especially as bots get much, much better at appearing human.

It is kind of funny when occasionally a bot messes up and posts the same comment more than once in a thread across more than one account.

I think this is why people increasingly prefer closed off, invite only communities as well. You can vet people coming into a discord community a lot easier and avoid a lot of the nonsense that happens on more open, public, spaces like Reddit, or Twitter.