Yes. And this is a pattern we are seeing all over - thank you. It's it necessarily good or bad. just more open, democratic, cheaper.

Thats not like a sensible rule of thumb. If we 'democratise' landmines, it would be clearly bad. This is similar

But maybe it's because of FTC rules: fake followers are legally okay, but fake likes and fake comments could be considered a fake review and therefore FTC violation.

Or they're making bank on dating site affiliate fees as a side hustle...

I too get those (messages lately) friend requests, and almost always by the time I read the message the account has been deactivated (when it says FB user).

So, overall, I think they're doing a reasonably good job on this particular problem.

Interesting that we have such different experiences, I wonder why that is. (remember that on FB, a 1 in a million event occurs approximately 3k times per day).

Just a couple of days back, something had been bothering me about some new-ish commenters I'd encountered on Reddit, so I did an unscientific check. I realised that about a year or so back, Reddit quietly made it so that when you create an account, they autosuggest a username of the form "Word1-Word2-Number" or "Word1Word2Number", making it hard to tell apart from automated bot/astroturf accounts.

(Try it out -- look at the profiles of any account you encounter that has the above form, and they've been created pretty much always on/after October 2020)

My conspiracy theory is that this was a growth marketing hack to muddy the obvious differences between regular people accounts and bots/spammers.