It’s the one thing that all (or most of us, I guess) have in common; we’re all here because of what’s going on there. It’s natural to want to talk about it.
It’ll pass; I’m already seeing a lot of non-reddit content on my home feed now, whereas day 1 it was probably 95% posts of the sort you’re talking about.
It went about as expected, IMO. 90% of redditors just don’t care that much - even if they agreed with the blackout in principle, most of them were likely just waiting patiently for their favourite subs to reopen so they could go back to browsing as usual. A quick browse through some of my subscribed (and still open) subs revealed a lot of commenters weren’t even clear about what was going on.
But it has had the effect of essentially kickstarting a community here which seems to be taking shape nicely and there’s finally a (small but growing fast) alternative to reddit - which didn’t really exist before. I can see the following months and years seeing a gradual shift in user base from reddit to here.
Reddit’s not going to die overnight; that was never going to happen. But it’s possible it’s the beginning of the end of their empire and the slow decline to the ranks of the remember-that-website-whatever-happened-to-that club. Time will tell I guess.
Experience, mainly.
I used to run a phpbb forum, on average the bot signups outnumbered the real people 10 or 20 times. And that was with some fairly robust anti spam measures in place - something I think this platform is too new to have properly sorted out yet.
I may be wrong, I don’t know how the back end here works, but any place where people can post publicly will be infested with bot signups very quickly. The only real variable is how good the anti spam measures are.