Ignoring all the criticism regarding retail traders from outlets, there's a whole history of it being abused by mods for personal gain as well as the literal bots.
Not too long ago one of the mods created a fake account and posted fake Tesla gains in attempt to manipulate the market as well as monetize the sub for a scam company.
More recently some mods tried to monetize the whole sub with movie deals and other media venues. The reddit administrators ended up nuking a lot of mods include one who was doing actual moderation and was good for the community of the sub. (The one mod was later reinstated by Reddit)
Separate from all the mod issues is the large amount of astroturfing that went on. All too often tons of newly created accounts were posting trying to create hype around some stocks (suspiciously Chinese owned companies).
Annecdotally, I've seen a few posts complaining about the quality of the posts in the sub as new users have flooded in. But I haven't been paying attention long enough to know how true it is.
Previously most of the people who were on WSB at least knew what they were talking about and all the dumb jokes were known to be jokes. Made a lot of fun stories, because the people who did exceptionally dumb stuff got sucked into the hype of people who knew what they were doing winning/losing big.
When $GME happened the sub got flooded with people who thought that buying $GME was a social movement and caused the quality of everything to go down a ton. It's gotten better over time and massive user growth has happened before, but not on this scale. Honestly the place is totally different from where it was even six months ago, which is unfortunate as the culture was really something.
Not too long ago one of the mods created a fake account and posted fake Tesla gains in attempt to manipulate the market as well as monetize the sub for a scam company.
More recently some mods tried to monetize the whole sub with movie deals and other media venues. The reddit administrators ended up nuking a lot of mods include one who was doing actual moderation and was good for the community of the sub. (The one mod was later reinstated by Reddit)
Separate from all the mod issues is the large amount of astroturfing that went on. All too often tons of newly created accounts were posting trying to create hype around some stocks (suspiciously Chinese owned companies).