Reddit

It is unlikely that even reddit themselves are able to conclusively answer this, as the protests made many people leave and many other people come or come back.

The userbase "churned" a great deal, which serves to obscure the specifics.

To add to this, if I were spez, and I was bleeding users rapidly, I would be willing to employ bots to inflate my numbers. I sincerely doubt spez is more ethical than I am, and it takes no genius to come up with this idea.