Let’s assume the top executives of Reddit are worried about Lemmy.
Lemmy is taking away users and attention. The ressources that Reddit is desperately attempting to sell to advertisers.
In a meeting, Steve Huffman, Jen Wong, Drew Vollero and Jim Squires decide to spend $1 million dollars on a secret project called Cobra.
Their goal is simple : to destroy Lemmy. Apart from the top management, no Reddit employee is aware of project Cobra, because it must not leak in the media.
How could they actually sabotage Lemmy?
A few thoughts:
Offer the folks running the largest instances a full-time, salaried position. Make them feel like kings/queens. (You will eventually fire them/try to destroy them.)
Now Steve Huffman uploads the special folder on his desktop labeled PRIVATE GOONING MATERIAL and leaks to media that Lemmy is a haven of CP, so that eventually government gets involved and targets Lemmy as a left-wing radical organization allied with Antifa.
Introduce a Reddit fediverse instance and aggressively federate with the remaining major instances while also encouraging the federation of Facebook, Google, etc…
They for sure would federate with lemmy, claiming reddit to be the main hub for Lemmy.
But after a good while start randomly dropping/blocking different lemmy instances and just try to stop content being shared across lemmy itself.
It’s also right in the ballpark for a zuckerberg stunt as well…