Racial discrimination is fundamentally created by the innate fear of the Other. But it is supercharged by capitalism. Slave trade was created to create cheap expendable labor force to drive profits. When it was ended segregation and other discriminatory practices were instituted to protect the owners of businesses. These practices were systemic and we are still seeing their results.

The copy/paste thing has been true for years even before the Reddit API exodus. Also bot-farms have been active for quite some time as well.