It's a bit trite, but also true -- a significant portion of reddit is totally made up. It's worse than it was a few years ago, but I have no way whatsoever to measure it. Occasionally I bump into youtube videos which are just narrations of reddit posts which tell some interesting or controversial story. They all really sound fabricated. There's no way for me to know with certainty, but I think extreme skepticism is the safer assumption for any large reddit.
They’ve never forced folks to verify email addresses, but the last 6 months or so you see tons of accounts commenting on very on discussions, writing bland ai-like, making posts that are just riling things up, and/or hiding their post and comment history.
What was once the last bastion of interesting social media is quickly becoming useless.
Everything on the internet is fake. That is as true now as it always was.
For every real post, I can make up a fake one that's more agreeable to the hivemind and therefore will be more upvoted. Since you see a limited amount of posts in a session, you will only see fake posts and the real ones will be hidden forever.
