Sometimes people respond with contextually sensible words, but its almost like they didn't actually read what I said, just the topic of what I said.

I have been chalking it up to international userbase and possible translation issues, but maybe I'm encountering some bots? I would say its about 1/10 of my responses is kind of... Off?

They get plenty of traction too.

I know people like to hate on piefeds "Attitude" % on users, but you can clearly see on piefed if a user is mass down-voting posts, if they are new, if they have been flagged by other instances as bots/spam/etc.... it helps with finding red flags on accounts that just popped into existence.

I always get suspicious of accounts with firstsecondword123 because this is the fediverse, you dont need to post-pend numbers if you dont want to. Just make your own instance or something. But you see a lot of bots that do that, mostly on the big social media sites.

all the relationship ones on reddit are AI/ fake. its so preposterous sounding its not believable.

Mods: "That's it... I'm making it so they have to be 9 days old now... And permabanning the first commenter I get from the announcement. Fuck yeah, now I'm modding!" Cracks open a Fresca

I'd say it's worse than that. A lot of subs are now limited by karma as well, thus getting your first 100 can now take upwards of a month. This is primarily because the subs that do allow posting have become overrun by new accounts and bots.

The new user experience has become atrociously bad, with a lot of users complaining on r/newtoreddit. Many end up getting pushed away and leaving. Without new users, bots have less competition. Makes for an all-around terrible experience for all users, new and old.