Also, lurkers would have nothing to lurk around if it weren't for heavier posters, many of whom use third party apps to paper over the various papercuts of posting with the official site/client.

What do you think it would cost to buy a non insignificant amount Reddit accounts from power users to own their comments and remove them from Reddit? And if Reddit restores them, file DMCA takedowns? Should be cheap, right? With the value of Reddit users being so low?

If that is where the value is being generated, that is Reddit's value lynch pin.

> And if Reddit restores them, file DMCA takedowns?

Almost certainly, Reddit's terms of service means you grant them a irrevocable perpetual license to your posts, so a DMCA takedown would be in bad faith.

There are no material repercussions for bad faith DMCA takedowns, as the evidence has shown [1]. The legal burden still falls on Reddit to triage and action them. With that said, you would want to own the Reddit accounts as IP in an LLC that holds no financial assets to shield you from any liability (not legal advice, we're just having fun talking hypotheticals). You'd own the copyright to the content, let Reddit try to argue in court the requests were bad faith. You didn't agree to the terms when the account changed hands.

You wouldn't have to do it forever, only long enough to materially impact Reddit's valuation pre-IPO. This is simply flipping the "ask for forgiveness instead of permission" model of Silicon Valley on its head. Or is that only okay when you're trying to get obnoxiously wealthy off the backs of everyone else?

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Reddit admins could automate the reposting of old content from years ago, complete with comments, and I think most doomscrolling lurkers would never notice.

Karma-point-harvesting bots do this already! Even comments -- one bot user reposts a popular post, and other bot users repost the top comments from the last time it was posted.