The general population doesn't care about freedom or censorship, they just want entertainment. Also a significant part of those "users" are bots.
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They recently started requiring logins, especially for old.reddit
And that is the only reason the userbase is rising, and the user base rising is the only reason they started requiring accounts to view the site.
Numbers must go up.
So the user base is not actually growing. The people who were reading old.reddit without an account had to sign up now. But that was a one-time bump in registered accounts. It does not necessarily mean that the user base is increasing.
Don't they always?
If not bot accounts, then probably old users making new accounts due to being auto-permabanned and not being able to get anywhere with the shitty AI support to restore it, and they aren't subtracting banned accounts from the total user count.
Doesn't say anything about bots, so I'd bet that's a good part of it.
They were running bots in all sorts of places when I left like 3-4 years ago, and it's only gotten worse. Plus, what easier way to drive up EnGaGeMenT with all of your UsErS than to constantly add more and more fake users to keep the handful of morons who stay around entertained.
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