Excerpt:
Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago. This suggests the problem is way fewer users, not the same number of users browsing less. The huge and universal dropoff also suggests that people left, either because of the changes or the protests, and they aren’t coming back.
If you open Reddit without an account on a browser, it will automatically create a username for you when you are on site now. Hopped on to look at a post on a semi active subreddit and saw I was somehow logged in, but it was an auto generated account name. Wonder if they are trying to boost numbers that way as well
Can you replicate this using fully fresh Chrome and Firefox user profiles over a fresh IP address, like that of a paid VPN? It will be breaking news material if true.
Just tried it and that did not happen. There was a pop-up asking me to sign in via Google though so I’m going to guess you accidentally clicked yes on that at some point.
It was actually on a work computer using chrome that absolutely no one uses, I’m not even logged in on that machine nor is chrome. This happened a few days ago now, let me see if it will do it again.
Here’s what popped up
Is this where all those auto-generated-ass names were coming from when I was arguing with anti-protesters?
deleted by creator
It’s the birthplace of all the quality memes after all. Reddit clearly saw that as more of an opportunity rather than a risk.
That seems like a GDPR and CCPA nightmare.