they have been culling via shadowbanning for a month now
Way more than months. This goes at least as far back as the 2016 kerfuffle over The_Donald, ChapoTrapHouse, and other increasingly popular outside-the-mainstream communities.
Honestly easier to trace it back to 2012, when Reddit was gaining popular steam and doing lots of high profile AMAs. Shadowbanning was a great way to quash the mix of spam accounts and hecklers without letting the people running the accounts know they needed to roll up new ones.
postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Sion a rebrand to Redbot.com