After using Reddit for many, many years, at this point I personally am fairly convinced that the majority of posts and submissions on many of the high-value subs is inauthentic content.

Inauthentic content being some combination of bot posts and coordinated shill/sockpuppet posts. Either for political/social manipulation (enforcing a narrative and allowed ideas), as well as some economic manipulation (paid posts shilling for a product/movie/person/etc).

In the past the inauthentic accounts had patterns that you could more easily find. Names that are all generated the same way, or comment history patterns that all match. It was 100% obvious a few years ago that there was a lot of manipulation going on. After being exposed a few times they've improved, and now with LLM capabilities added in it's much harder for a random person to clearly be able to identify them.

I feel like one day there will be a whistleblower who finally reveals to the world exactly how much manipulation has been going on (especially by governments) and it'll be a pretty shocking revelation. Until then we have little proof, as it seems the owners of such sites either willingly or unwillingly or unknowingly cooperate with it.

Even the founders confessed - no, bragged with the fact that they started the site with hundreds of fake profiles. If that wasn't of any concern to them then, why would it be one now?

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...

Things built on lies rarely have a good ending, I wonder whether they considered that back then

Social networks should NEVER be run by for-profits (unless, perhaps, if funding derives 100% from the users themselves), we see why again and again, and yet humanity is failing to learn