Precisely this. From a philosophical-logical POV, it doesn’t make sense. From the POV of establishing and maintaining power/ dominance/ oppression/ hegemony, however, it’s the only thing that makes sense.

I used to be active on one of my country’s most popular forums, if ranked by daily visits. Self-help Q&A style. Apart from me, there were pretty much only three users contributing about 90% of the content. One of them being the only mod. It took me years to figure out, from the timing and the writing style of the posts, that this mod also poses nearly all of the questions and gives all of the first answers too, using a new single-use sock puppet each time.
At the start of this year, it devolved into plain attention whoring and it was really sad, so I left.

That Absolute, see also here, is something nefarious, possibly used for industrial espionage. My company is a client and using one of its IP addresses, I could see documentation that was quite concerning. In the background, it checks all of your files for anything that looks like a password, a social security number or a credit card number, then uploads these files to some server to protect them… What’s really weird is that I cannot access the same information from an outside IP address, but here’s a review, corroborating parts of it. Make of it what you will!

I was gifted the cheapest and most disgusting sweets money can buy. They looked like they came from the black market. Threw almost all of them away the next day. No other gifts.
Then, I was taken to a restaurant which served some truly disgusting food. To be fair, it had recently changed ownership and used to be decent up to that point.
And that was it for the day. I probably wouldn’t have minded too much, if it hadn’t been a milestone birthday.

Middle manager.
At least in my current job. There are nice AND useful ones out there, but in my dept., there’s positively neither.

It’s become a product. You can still discuss anything on Reddit unless it diminishes the value of the product. E.g. in a thread discussing the merits of Hyundai or Coca-Cola or whatever, which I’m sure will be totally organic and not paid-for and bot-bum-rushed at all, any negative comment about these brands will get you buried at -6 or below within mere minutes.

Right? Way too often, I see some really interesting comments sitting at 0 or -1, and some still somewhat interesting and/ or arguably good-faith comments have something like -50 because they go against the current direction of the herd. I usually upvote at least the former, but for the latter, it’s not going to matter much, unfortunately.
Furthermore, some mods get way too personally invested and take an obvious disliking to you so everything you contribute will be pushed to the bottom of the stack anyways.

If he hadn’t been to jail, maybe he put them in storage for 30 years specifically because he didn’t want to be recognized in his new life.

Wie Sie sehen, sehen Sie nichts.