Essentially yes, my thinking was simply that it’s A/B/C/D/E/F/G/H…etc testing.
I had reddit accounts in the past, though I deleted them all and stopped participating about 2-3 years ago. My assumption is that my passive scrolling was connected to previous accounts through IP, device ID, proximity to other devices, other accounts, typing cadence, etc., and I fell in the category of “maybe we can entice them back”.
I also agree that reddit likely made the decision to sacrifice a lot of high quality low engagement content for the purposes of mass market engagement farming. It’s sad as shit. I’ve got copies of wikipedia from back in the day, but I never thought to download reddit.
Edit: Uhh, maybe there should be a group doing annual backups of lemmy. It’s a nice place now, but so was reddit.