And it's much easier to hide this problem on a site where the users are anonymous.
Reddit wouldn't be the first company to juice the numbers before an IPO. They've also admitted to taking advantage of fake accounts in the past: https://www.themarysue.com/reddit-fake-account-origins/
Its very cleary an IPO strategy is to hire "marketing companies" that are really botnet controllers to create users for your site to make it more attractive to investors. Then leadership gets to play dumb when these "marketing companies" are filling their user roster.
Maintaining plausible deniability is all that's necessary to avoid the legal issues. Add very minimal bot detection just to claim you aren't doing nothing about the problem.
I've stopped using reddit for a lot of reasons. But a big one was that more and more of the content being posted was from fake users. I had an account for ~11/12 years and this was always an issue. But it seemed to really ramp up in 2023. I also started receiving direct messages from bots in 2023. That had never happened before.
This is an anecdotal experience. But there are quite a few users saying the same thing lately: there's a bot problem like there wasn't before.
Sell me. How do they usually do that? Any concrete example?
You prefer them to create real looking accounts or they start stealing them.
If it gets harder only affects the price.