Just look at how Reddit threads and threads on communities.win frequently get diverted to the point where the conversation ends up being about something totally irrelevant to the post.

When you think about it, Reddit was one of the most genius ways to create consensus propaganda/marketing and subvert people.

Old style forums because they didn’t have parent sub threads but were just post-reply-reply-reply etc strictly maintained the topic of the op. If you wanted to discuss something else you had to make a new post. Yahoo answers for things like homework help was also similar in that people would ask a question and random off topic nonsense would be reported as spam.

Until Reddit off topic replies to a post were considered bad forum etiquette so it made it hard for bots or marketing firms to shape discussion. Random irrelevant off topic nonsense would get deleted. Walls of text replies which are typical of comments on Reddit would also get deleted.

Now you post something on Reddit and within minutes some weirdo or bot will divert the discussion to a completely irrelevant topic. This makes it hard to discuss anything political because govt agents or soys will divert the topic. It’s also very effective for creating an illusion of consensus because hundreds of bots can spam a thread and create an illusion that the view they’re advocating is normal.