“Huffman […] together with Ohanian launched Reddit in June 2005. Embarrassed by an empty-looking site, the founders created hundreds of fake users for their posts to make it look more populated” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit#History

And the beautiful irony is that in their mission to secure an increased IPO valuation they merely reduced it substantially. Gonna need some more popcorn as we watch them burn it to the ground

Agreed. For years I had truly (and naively) believed that Reddit, despite their prior blunders with which we are now all mostly familiar, would maintain an acceptable level of decency and never push things so far as alienate their core userbase. Shot themselves squarely in the foot on this one I think, as their recent changes affect so many.

Looks like r/programming discovered the astroturfing, so in true Reddit fashion they simply shut down the subreddit entirely to avoid the spread of negative public sentiment. Thanks for galvanizing my resolve to migrate to the fediverse, Spez