Jokes on Meta: I don’t have friends. Those are an unacceptable liability these days.

That is unintentionally hilarious… and correct.

Then you’re not one of the bad actors I’m concerned about. The problem with this change is that there’s no way for other people to tell the difference. If I have suspicions about the motivations of the person (assuming they are a person) I’m interacting with, and I cannot disprove those suspicious to my own satisfaction, that leaves me with two rational options: 1) Blind faith, which in an anonymous Internet context is particularly unjustifiable, or 2) To assume bad faith and act accordingly.

This has some really unfortunate consequences.

That is very much the first people I would expect making use of that feature, yes.

Reddit did WHAT?

Most recently, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias