Technology

My "make it make sense" theory is--this is entirely about the IPO and we need to look at the biggest issue from last years social media sale.

Musk sued Twitter for obfuscating/failing to disclose how much of it's activity was bots during negotiations. It was a legit point of contention. These social media services are incentivized to turn a blind eye to the problem. (eg The "impressions" number that Facebook and Google sell advertisers is all malarkey) You'll notice that now that Musk owns twitter he doesn't say a word about bots other than occationally patting himself on the back for shutting bots down (ok yeah sure elon).

I think reddit is in a similar predicament where they really want to inflate their user stats with bot activity for the IPO, but they can't because the app stores provide solid stats on users and user activity and they don't control that flow of information, the 3rd party developers do.

If they think 15%-30% of the sites activity is repost bots, they really don't care about alienating the 5% of users using third-party apps.

The AI learning angle is all smoke-and-mirrors.

And in reddit's case, rather than someone like Elon buying/fact checking the terms of purchase, for IPOs you have to get your disclosure documents past the SEC. Smart people, but hardly experts at how social media companies run.