I’m sorry you got the idea that my users were spamming Reddit with referral links. It was hardly like that and I personally checked that every user was being tasteful, and sent “don’t spam” only a handful of times. I had alerts setup for each source of referrer (via analytics) and for each one that came from reddit (parsed by the ID of the post) I'd individually check to ensure that it wasn't "bad," and that the user wasn't just schilling—if an unreasonable (see: 3) last comments were slinging a referral link, I'd straight up ask them to remove them.

That probably doesn’t change your perception—I, too, feel like Reddit is pretty bad these days—but I felt the need to say something anyway. I ran a pretty tight ship and had placed a lot of importance on perception and reputation. Building trust was important to my operation, from both a growth standpoint and a customer service standpoint. When shit broke (as it often did, considering I operated as the mouse instead of the cat), my users took my word that an attempted fix was in the works.