Bots? No, there are actual people who are paid to vote and post comments on various reddit discussions. They might be supported by a secondary layer of bots, but there is a certain amount of human interaction required to do things like post comments, which are paid for by social media interests.

And those social media companies will start targeting any successful reddit clone from the very start. Right now I would suspect at least 50% of all new saidit accounts are being created by hostile social media operations, prepared to sell their influence on the site whenever it might be useful. It happened very quickly on Voat five years ago, and these companies are even more ready now.