A campaign by a marketing team to give the false impression of something.
In this case it’s a campaign by reddit to make it look like there are lots of users who are in agreement with reddit instead of the truth where it’s universally hated.
It's a play on the term "grass root movement". A grass root movement is one that starts with the people at the bottom, not at the top. So if a bunch of people got together (mostly independent of each other) to promote or protest something, that is a "grass roots" action.
Astroturf is basically fake grass, so "astroturfing" is something that is made to look like a "grass roots" movement but it isn't.
It shows how bots were there all the time posting adverts and paid posts anyway. One of the reasons to limit API is other companies were using them to advertise (hidden as a comment or post) without paying the piper.
Reddit just put itself at the end of the content website human centepede. Why bother re-inserting the 6-time digested poop somewhere further up the centepede?
Yes, Infinity and Relay still working makes sense since they are going subscription model, but Boost still functioning is an anomaly.
Edit: Apparently as per a post on r/boostforreddit which references a post on r/redditdev, Reddit said the API changes would take place over the coming weeks. Not completely on July 1st.
I'm pretty sure AMAs in the past have introduced a lot of people to Reddit (Obama's AMA comes to mind). Before that AMAs were fairly popular too amongst celebrities.
The reduced amount of comments here actually motivate me to comment more. On Reddit I wouldn't even bother commenting on a lot of posts as they would have comments in the hundreds sometimes and I couldn't see the point to bother just having my comment never seen in a sea like that.
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