I can confirm this is probably happening because some of their staff are leaky leaky among certain groups. Unless they cancel which I doubt.
I have suspicions that it might even be crypto related, they actively pursued a reddit blockchain thing at one point in the past before sacking the main person responsible halfway through the job with 1 week notice.
Predictions on how this turns out?
You know? There was (technically still is) an argentinian site called "Taringa". It started back in the early 2000, as a software sharing site. By 2008 it blew up in popularity. You could find music, movies, games, books, etc. Awesome with folk who didn’t know how to use torrents.
Which each site update they added more "social media" features. Communities, profile personalization, etc. But, by 2010 approximately, they were forced to stop the "pirate share" stuff. Instead of dying, the site become another forum. People were sharing recipes, tutorials and, above all, shitposting.
From there on, the site underwent a steady "enshittification". Without downloads, popularity came from the forum aspect. And, being one of the more prominent sites in Argentina (and the region too) astroturfing became a more prevalent, and notorious, thing. The 2015 elections doble down on the politic discussions + reactionary content became the norm.
The point? By the end of 2015 they implemented a "revenue system". They paid in bitcoins to each user who made a popular post. Bum, the site was invaded by bots, reposts, etc. By 2017 it was a desolate wasteland. The tech bro owners sold the page to a random company and ran.
There is more to it, but fuck post 2010 Taringa and I hope Reddit finds the same end too.
Incentivising botting sounds like something reddit would do.
they were pushing their shit hard on twitter before the muskening. they had a brand redesign but i never even liked the taringa's "social media" features. not surprised reactionary stuff became the norm either, post-link sharing, taringa survived on the shoulders of poringa, most of the userbase was incredibly porn-brained. with that in mind, you can tell exactly what the admins were thinking when monetizing posts.