I wouldn’t say paranoid, more that it’s how that works on larger communities like Reddit. When there’s an audience, the companies find creative ways to reach them, which is how astroturfing became a thing.

The tradeoff of being on a smaller site where that stuff doesn’t happen just means it’s harder for information to spread when there’s no one who wants to post it. It’s hard to find that goldilocks zone of a decently large community of people passionate about a hobby before it gets big enough to look profitable to someone

No one is “reaching” us here, don’t worry. There’s no need to be paranoid.

That is an extremely naive take. All it takes is one person to notice the verse or it to get a little bigger. The work required to get the reddit bot nets to also invade here would be tiny.

Plus by its very nature the verse is basically defenseless. It’s the definition of security through obscurity.