Glad you see what I'm saying. 5 years ago the cat was out of the bag, just look at my most popular post on reddit ever: https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/5vn4k3/forbescom_reddit_is_being_manipulated_by_big/

But it's taking time for everyone to see how widespread it is, and how many companies and governments are all doing it. It's so cheap compared to traditional advertising, they'd be financially irresponsible not to!

The list of general motivations may be short, but in specific there are many ways to accomplish this goal of destabilizing a site. Like if an admin publicly says in a moment of frustration "x really annoys me but it's not against the rules so I guess I'll have to ignore it" then the attackers will double down on making sure x hits the front page every day. If an admin says to the community "They're DDOSing us bad and it's making us go offline" then they know to double down on the DDOS attacks. And so on, and so on. That's what I mean by "ideas and new motivations". If they know what's working, or where our weak points are, then it just emboldens them. So admins have to be quiet about it to protect the website and the users of the website, but as a side effect it keeps those same users in the dark about what's actually happening.

Overall saidit has done pretty well at dealing with this, compared to sites like ruqqus, voat, and poal. We've still had our fair share of turmoil too, but unlike them we're still standing strong.