Is this new to post-blackout reddit is or has it been this way for a while. Top post of r/all is a tweet from like 2 years ago about a “current event” that no one has talked about since then and 100% of the comments are talking about this like this topic is the focus of today’s or any recent time’s 24 hour news cycle. Nearly 30K upvotes. 100 comments. Feels like ai/bot cosplaying what an actual hot reddit post would be like but in a world without people.
I don’t think you’re exactly wrong but I also don’t think you get what you’re talking about.
Honkai star rail is a game by the people who made genshin impact. It’s a gacha (read: disguised gambling) game that is more polished than most other gacha games (as in, there is an actual game around the gambling part). It had more than 23 million people playing just yesterday. This is more than the top ten games on steam combined. They also happen to have an absolutely massive marketing budget, and them paying reddit to boost their shit isn’t out of the question, but honestly I just don’t think they have to.
There exists a world in which all the subreddits you mention are propped up by reddit admins to fake engagement but ultimately there is a common element to all of these: every subreddit you mention is populated heavily by normies, who don’t give a fuck about the API change and just want to keep their corner going. /r/AITAH exists because TikTok users can’t wait for the bot-voice narration to repost it to TikTok, and they don’t care about the API, they just want their vaguely plausible story (also /r/amitheasshole’s subcount is grossly inflated by people sho subscribed long ago but stopped reading, in the same way a YouTuber with millions of subscribers might only make 10 000 views).
/R/popculturechat users basically don’t go outside their sub, and are typically not technologically inclined. The API changes do not matter to them, and that’s true of all subreddits you mentioned.
/r/peterexplainsthejoke is a bit of a wierd one because the meme of Peter griffin’s explaining jokes has been around for a long time now. Maybe knowyourmeme is just not that known for new users anymore?