> Reddit for example started out by doing shady shit. They would fake activity on the site with bots.

That's not the biggest problem by far. They started out catering to literal pedos, look into the r/jailbait controversy.

Reddit still has a substantial amount of… not CSAM but rather skeezy porn. They just kind of hide it and ban it from the front page and auto feeds.

There’s a long history of revenge porn and other nonconsensual porn showing up there and being hard to remove.

The whole site had been declining badly too, and is loaded with bots. Still an okay place to get news in some areas but pretty meh and the comments are always echo chambers.