The reality is that unless you have immense, immense scale (i.e., Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn), making money off social media is impossible. Twitter barely made any money before Elon Musk took it over, and it’s making less now.
Reddit is pseudo-anonymous too and is harder to monetize, because high ad rates come from being able to identify your users.
Can you explain what the controversy is about? So the /r/Android mods tried to start an Android community on the fediverse but other people got to them first? How are they astroturfing?