It's not all illusion though, particularly in smaller communities.

The big subs are seemingly filled to the brim with both post and comment repost bots. It's fun when they mess up and you see a few accounts post the same comments in the same thread then search and the comment was an actual users comment from days earlier.

The smaller communities only seem to highlight that most of the users on reddit are bots.

I keep seeing this bot comment and i'm not fully buying it. I'm not naïve, I know they exist. But on the small subs I read, anything that goes against that subs hivemind are called bots... including my own replies.

Am I a bot?

Agreed. I only tolerate reddit (for now) because it's always been better than Twitter/X and the alternatives haven't matured yet.