"Better question, and this is something I see time and again, how do sites missing such basic functionality even get any funding to start with? "

By abandoning ethics and building a moat so that those with ethics can't breach the moat.

"In the early days, reddit's community was built up thanks to hundreds of fake profiles created by the site's co-founders, according to Steve Huffman (coincidentally, a reddit co-founder). To make the site look populated and diverse, Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, the other founder, would submit links of their own choosing, each time under a new username."

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...