This is a look at the past 24 hours of #reddit comments (per minute windows). The line at the bottom (near 4-5k) is the usual activity. Some spikes are greater than 4 times the normal Reddit comment volume.
Reddit is experiencing a huge spam issue with little mitigation.
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In the past 24 hours, Reddit had over 1,500 spam comments IN ONE SECOND. Reddit normally gets ~100 comments a second at peak times.
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The body content is removed. It's weird -- Reddit is detecting the comments are spam but still assigning ids to the comments and exposing them via the API.