For most hackers or wanna-bes (often called Script Kiddies, that is, people (generally young, even children thus the "Kiddies") who are not technologically inclined enough to be real hackers and see a tutorial online on how to run pre-written scripts that repeatedly perform various functions), the answer to "Why do you do it?" is often:

1. "Because I was bored."

2. "Because I can."

Very rarely are other reasons given.

Some people enjoy causing suffering to others. On the internet they are termed trolls. Irl people usually just call them assholes. Most people have encountered them before.

I think they are far more common and likely than anyone giving two shits about reddit.

They're just trolls. Lemmy is popular enough that it's fun target for them, but still small and infantile enough that you don't have to be hackerman to ddos it. Reddit, twitter, etc... would be constantly getting ddos'd just for the lulz by people if they didn't have the infrastructure to make it a challenge.

I was using voip.ms last year when they were DDoS'd for over a week, by a group demanding payment via anonymous crypto. The DDoS ended when they switched to CloudFlare (which was probably pretty difficult because they're a SIP provider.)

Almost any website with a small number of servers is vulnerable to this attack, which happens to be great business for CloudFlare. I wonder which companies are most effectively competing with CloudFlare?

Nah, it's not the 00s anymore. Hacker gangs are a real thing today.

I'm not actually in the security field so take this with a grain of salt. But I believe that these attacks play a similar role to random attacks in low level gangs. It proves that your criminal group has power and the ability to deface a website.

So if you publish that Lemmy.world will go down next week because your hackers are on it.... It's advertising. Its just business. It proves that your hackers have an ability and that you are up for sale.

You don’t think just being bored is enough reason for some?

Some people just want to watch the world burn.

With my tinfoil hat on, I'd say one concern is that Cloudfare is basically a monopoly and nothing is stopping them from DDoSing sites to force them to use their product.