Just a couple of days back, something had been bothering me about some new-ish commenters I'd encountered on Reddit, so I did an unscientific check. I realised that about a year or so back, Reddit quietly made it so that when you create an account, they autosuggest a username of the form "Word1-Word2-Number" or "Word1Word2Number", making it hard to tell apart from automated bot/astroturf accounts.
(Try it out -- look at the profiles of any account you encounter that has the above form, and they've been created pretty much always on/after October 2020)
My conspiracy theory is that this was a growth marketing hack to muddy the obvious differences between regular people accounts and bots/spammers.
Just a couple of days back, something had been bothering me about some new-ish commenters I'd encountered on Reddit, so I did an unscientific check. I realised that about a year or so back, Reddit quietly made it so that when you create an account, they autosuggest a username of the form "Word1-Word2-Number" or "Word1Word2Number", making it hard to tell apart from automated bot/astroturf accounts.
(Try it out -- look at the profiles of any account you encounter that has the above form, and they've been created pretty much always on/after October 2020)
My conspiracy theory is that this was a growth marketing hack to muddy the obvious differences between regular people accounts and bots/spammers.