It doesn’t matter to current leadership of reddit how many people it pisses off. For every user of third-party apps, there are now 10 bots and sockpuppet accounts it gets to count as active users.
And that is exactly how you blow the roof off your IPO. Alphabet and Meta have been lying about their user engagement numbers for decades at this point. “Impressions” are all self-reported and they have zero incentive to be honest. Reddit’s VC money is begging Spez to get into this game before the IPO. For all they lies they are saying out loud, this is the quiet one.
I’ve suspected this for years… it’s part of why I went over to imgur. The bots aren’t as good at processing images, or at least they weren’t back then. Reddit is probably the worst of the bunch, just because of all the exposure and openness.
Hell there are entire subreddits devoted to training gpt bots, where they just game out theoretical directions the conversations can take with each other.