It's long forgotten how reddit was open source. Not only that but people hosted their own instances of reddit as test beds for botting and who knows what else.

The quickmeme incident got memoryholed real fast. That era of image macro memes was basically entirely fabricated.

I disagree, I met people from reddit at meets IRL and we played darts and drank beer.

but to be fair, the first post ever on Reddit was the Downing Street Memo.

astroturfing dint take off til trump came into the picture the 1st term, thats when people start flooding the politics and news subs(the gop at the time were threatening to hold social media platforms like reddit , if they dont ban these "illicit subs"). reddit was more diverse before his 1st term.