It’s possible that the enforcement of a rate limit isn’t because of AI scraping, but rather because they failed to migrate before the June 30th deadline.
for me it’s been a slow process to transfer my reddit addiction to lemmy, so i’m still somewhat on there, but it’s nowhere close to what it has been like before the protests. a lot of my communities are still closed, others have reopened but there’s a noticeably lower volume.
reopen/stay closed discussions also show an interesting pattern of skewing more and more towards reopen the longer they go on, suggesting that the people who want reddit to stay closed have left, which is consistent with how the rest of the platform feels.
i doubt that many lurkers have seen the same effect yet (in fact, i noticed a pattern with the people expressing support for reopen, that they rarely comment at all, so my guess is the lurkers heavily favor reopening) but we’ll likely see a delayed effect in their numbers and/or engagement as well, as the content they’re supplied gets fewer and lower quality.