While this is absurdly conspiratorial, there is a grain of truth to it: early on in Reddit's history, the admins created fake accounts and posted on them to boost engagement[0]. More recently, after the blackout and user exodus, /r/de noticed a bunch of new German-language copies of popular English-language subs being created with a bunch of autotranslated comments[1]. So Reddit's administration is not above creating fake accounts and content to juice numbers.

How much of Reddit's engagement is faked is up for debate - I suspect it's less than we think. However, it'd be really funny if, say, when Reddit IPOs, someone at /r/WSB catches onto this and triggers a bunch of people shorting the stock.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmeDzx4SUME via https://www.themarysue.com/reddit-fake-account-origins/

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/13p889x/red...

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?

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.

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.

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

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?

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

They specifically reposed users content from other platforms then pinged them that it was being discussed on reddit. It's what caused me to use reddit for the first time.

This is why I say that anonymous sites like Reddit are not Social Media. If I am on there, there is zero proof that anyone else commenting is a human. They all could be bots and I have no way to prove otherwise.

What would be a non anonymous social network, Facebook? This very much applies to them too, iiuc..

On Facebook, there are connections to my family, friends, acquaintances. I know they are real because I’ve interacted with all of them in real life.

On some of the niche travel-related subs like r/bikepacking, it’s actually quite common to run into one’s fellow redditors in real life on some popular route around the world. You definitely know the high-value posts are coming from real people. Some posters aren’t anonymous at all, because they also have linked YouTube or Instagram accounts that use their real name and face. And from e.g. the person’s gear, the past travels they describe, or the internet drama they have witnessed, it’s easy to identity a person you run into as a fellow member of the sub.

Oh, the full-blown version is not just about reddit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

You are axiomatically not wrong about bots. That's what all the platforms in the Reddit genre do to fill content voids. It long predates sophistication like LLMs. It's like bots in a poker room site. The UX would suck without them.

But Reddit probably has the scale to do without in popular parts of the site.