Trying to figure out what the fuck havires is talking about. I have a couple guesses but neither of them are worthy of this level of introspection. Edit: Found it. ZOMG. This is some straight-up Grassy Knoll back'n'2daLEFT tinfoil hat gold. It's like accusing the Little Rascals of orchestrating the stock market crash of 1929. 2 things: 1) "SRS" "TumblrInAction" and a bunch of other movements on Reddit (including this whole delicious gambit are the work of SomethingAwful.com, that used to grief the website-of-the-moment but since 2009 or so have gotten all the lolz they could ever want out of Reddit. 2) Reddit used to be open-source. It was Alexis and Steve's hope that by putting the code out there someone would refine it to the point where it doesn't need hand-holding. The end result was a handful of Reddit clones that immediately fell apart without the minute-by-minute hand-pruning of spam that actually makes up the majority of the man-hours on Reddit. The only part that wasn't published was Reddit's anti-spam measures, which is probably because they didn't want you to see the Emperor's New Clothes. Somewhere not very deep behind a $10 paywall there's a bunch of clever-yet-marginally-antisocial gentlemen laughing their asses off. This article is six years old but the methods and motives are unchanged.