I occasionally pop back on to see if there’s any news about some of my favorite subs migrating to the fediverse that haven’t yet, and I’ve noticed that nearly all of my home page has massive posts in the vein of “comment your favorite ___ and then tomorrow we do our favorite ___!” Or like the “eliminate one ___ every day until we get to the favorite!”

One of my video game subs is doing it for least favorite characters, a TV show sub is doing favorite character quotes, a genre one doing favorite movies and then says it will move on to favorite books, etc.

They all seem to have started around the same day, and they all have options that are dozens long.

I’ve seen things like this pop up occasionally before but it’s so many of them all at once across vastly different subs I follow that have no connections to each other.

My corporate-conspiracy train of thought immediately started to wonder if admins are enticing users/actually posting themselves or w/e to create these kinds of threads that tend to draw lots of user engagement to try and get some numbers looking better. People tend to get really jazzed about these kinds of topics so these posts rn all have hundreds/thousands of comments and upvotes and such in subs that normally don’t see that much individual engagement on posts, and they’re all tailored to keep up for long periods of time with above-average (in my experience at least) numbers of options to work through to get to the “one.” And ofc people who are interested in them are going to keep coming back to check out what’s winning and vote on the next round, etc.

Wondering if anyone else has noticed anything like this or if it sounds as fishy to anyone else, or if perhaps it really is just all one big coincidence and I’m just being weird.