[kmlevitt]

It's one thing to add stories to a startup website and created the illusion of a couple dozen users instead of just zero. But all these years later Reddit has millions and millions of unique users per month and is still one of the top ten most visited websites in the US and has been for many years, beat out only by google/meta properties and wikipedia etc. You can fake "activity" internally but it's harder to fake stats calculated by independent evaluators.

And if it wasn't, everybody would be doing it. What makes you think reddit would have an advantage in doing that over anyone else?

[nerdponx]

It's not that Reddit is faking their own stats. The conspiracy theory is that these fake users are created by various non-Reddit organizations to promote an agenda, sell stuff, gather intelligence, etc. Reddit's level of awareness and complicity is secondary.

[kmlevitt]

Wouldn’t those same people just do the same thing everywhere on social media across the Internet though? Because if so it’s still doing well in the relative rankings.

[nerdponx]

If anything, the more popular the site, the more bots and astroturfing it would attract.

[weeblewobble]

It’s also facially absurd to anyone uses Reddit beyond scrolling the front page.

Some malicious actor is fabricating 100 comments a day about the nitty gritty of the New York Times crossword?

[kmlevitt]

Yeah if their AI commenting is all that good/convincing they should get out of social media and start the next trillion dollar company.