It would be interesting if it turns out reddit has a team to flood new competitors with unsavory accounts. It's exactly what they did when they started reddit, just with positive fake accounts instead of negative.
"Huffman said one other strategy proved crucial to Reddit’s early success, which most people are unaware of: The team submitted a ridiculous amount of content under fake user accounts to give the appearance of popularity."
...
“The first thing it did was it set the tone,” by the activity it displayed to visitors, Huffman said. “We were submitting content that we would have been interested in seeing. That meant the content on Reddit … was good. And when you show up , you know exactly what the site is about.”
"Huffman said one other strategy proved crucial to Reddit’s early success, which most people are unaware of: The team submitted a ridiculous amount of content under fake user accounts to give the appearance of popularity."
...
“The first thing it did was it set the tone,” by the activity it displayed to visitors, Huffman said. “We were submitting content that we would have been interested in seeing. That meant the content on Reddit … was good. And when you show up , you know exactly what the site is about.”
https://venturebeat.com/2012/06/22/reddit-fake-users/
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-t...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...