I still have my reddit account to look up local news. Over my time on reddit I joined several chat groups and over the past week I’ve noticed that people are being mass added to these groups. Even ones that have been dead for years suddenly have people posting and commenting on them. It’s very obvious that this is been done by bots to drive up reddits activity in the wake of the blackout.
I have no idea if there was a native setting to disable it or if it was RES’s doing but I completely forgot chat even existed.
So did Reddit, apparently. There’s now two chat functions, “Legacy chat”, and their new “Chat”.
Why they need that many remains a mystery, considering that they had a perfectly good messaging system before, that hasn’t been superseded by anything yet.