Reddit's /r/changemyview was revealed to be a social experiment carried out by some university, and LLMs/bots were 99% more effective than human speakers in persuading others that their viewpoints were right.

Take that information and roll with it into Edward Bernays methodology of psychology-based advertising and you'll see what Modern Reddit (RIP Schwartz) actually is.

but the bots were obvious until they started using LLMs, which was probably around 2022 that it became common...