I suspect the advertisers are starting to realize that a non-trivial part of Reddit (and other social media) has become bots talking to bots, ads to ads, and pe

I suspect the advertisers are starting to realize that a non-trivial part of Reddit (and other social media) has become bots talking to bots, ads to ads, and people on their 80th account screwing around. It's also why Reddit has been a pretty lousy "place" for a while now, and getting worse every day. I doubt this tech will fix it, but I can understand why Reddit is desperate to find a way to ensure that they have a product (people) to sell to customers (advertisers) that has some actual value. Meanwhile from the point of view of the average Redditor I suspect that ID validation is a deal breaker, and the population of real, non-ban-dodging, non-bot Redditors is actually a minority of the site's activity.