TL;DR:

AI bota and AI agents desteoyed it.

Sincerely a real problem and I as a sysadmin for various www sites: I loathe them daily.

If Cisco, F5 etc could invent a way to block these bots at the firewall and load balancer level, they’d make billions.

Indeed, but zero mod tools other than “delete post” 2 months in was genuinely laughable. To be frank, it should’ve launched with proper moderation: delete posts, ban users, sticky posts, filters for post-types etc. This is standard stuff that users shouldn’t even have to haggle for.

If they gave community moderators proper tools to help them here and put up walls - they could’ve mitigated a lot of this.