Reddit wants to boost their engagement numbers, so they've been pushing this (and a few similar) subreddits into people's feeds as "you might be interested in..." content even if you've never subscribed to reddits of this type. Basically borrowing a page from the early-internet "Hot or Not".
That push was the first thing that happened after the Apollo/third-party nonsense.
"Hey, we have a platform that's full of incredibly useful and obscure knowledge. It's so known for this that a video about how useful we are just went viral on another major platform.
So the natural next step is to go back fifteen years and try to redo facebook, right? Let's put more stupid ape stuff on the main page."
It is clear that Spez is furious that he's not Zuckerberg and he hopes he can retroactively become him.
"This may be the only place to get an honest answer" is an interesting way to title this, considering the piece discusses responses that are exactly what you'd tell an ugly person that asked you "Am I ugly?" if you didn't want to answer earnestly.
C'mon WSJ. Surely there are some ugly people posting there. If you're telling me we can get honest answers there, show your work.
