Not that I ascribe any sort of reddit awareness to Huffman but even then it's a new level of not understanding his own product. Twitter had oodles of celebrities, politicians, journalists, activists, government accounts, companies and so on and the verification was important before musk ruined it. I'm not sure reddit has actual entities of public life that regularly post. I've seen a stray Arnold Schwarzenegger mentioned somewhere and I think a YouTube video about tenacious D responding to fans but that's it. Who on earth needs verification on reddit as a user?
Yeah, a big part of the appeal of reddit was being anonymous. I signed up without even using an email address, and being able to do that was a most of why I was willing to create my account in the first place.
Is it my imagination or has that place really jumped the shark?
That screenshot makes it look like a boring version of neopets where there is only one species (Snoo). I hadn't noticed how childish it was getting because I used RIF.
Yet another thing that was done by the army of volunteer mods for over a decade, and now Reddit higher-ups are going "well that was cute and all, why don't you go home and let us show how it's really done."