I only have anecdotal information so take what you want from it. If one of my silly blog articles ends up on the front page I get a total of about 18K unique IP's that are mostly only humans which is about the same as I received last year. Not many people would be interested in my articles so take that with a grain of salt.

When my articles are only in /newest I get roughly ~20 to ~40 unique human viewers depending on the time of day which is down a little bit from last year. That makes sense to me as a number of regulars are probably tired of the LLM slop fest. If I put on my tinfoil underwear I could imagine some concerted effort to use LLM's to drive people away from independent platforms that are unable to filter the slop and/or attempt to warm up accounts and control the narrative on a number of platforms. I am leaning towards organized crime being behind some of it. Thankfully a number of regulars have stuck around and flag most of it and team dang are doing a great job of automating some of this.