Surely that's what happen. They probably couldn't compete with reddit at this point and bots were a secondary issue. Hoping that the interest will develop on its own, partially by the brand knowledge among older users wasn't enough.

It's been over a decade now and reddit despite of own exodus that happen recently still remains the default social link aggregator, and a global multi-forum. Not mention that younger generations prefer different kind of platforms and this largely-text based site might be not attractive to them at all