When I see 2-weeks old account "Incendiary-Leg-8592" responding to a post by another weeks old user "Pivotal-Kitchen-0498", I have a hard time believing they are humans behind them.
Also the software / programming subs are just spam hell now.
"i got tired of x so i built y" is my entire feed. none of my niches are safe. heartbreaking
Periodically an account shows up promoting something asinine and it sticks out like a sore thumb.
It’s actually easier for astroturfers to pick non-autogenerated names when they create accounts because they won’t feel any pressure to put much thought into it.
I would also bet that the vast majority of human users don’t bother to pick their own name because they don’t initially intend to post, they’re just creating an account because that’s all but required just to even read Reddit these days. Some fraction of them might later be motivated to comment, but by that time the account already exists.
Assuming you do indeed still use "old" reddit, the next time you see such a comment, open their account page in a private window (or any browser that isn't logged in). They might look different to themselves and most others.
And on new reddit you can see user names and display names even when accounts have their post/comment history hidden.
Word-Word-#### have become the norm ever since they've been pushing mobile users to use reddit. They also are a good source of questionable users.
One thing I found out is that normies really don't care about their usernames. They fundamentally don't understand the need for pseudonymity on the internet, so they are okay with whatever the website assigns to them.
It's just a little bit of extra friction to them to start sharing their opinions on the site.