It may be hard to fathom for someone who's so used to Reddit, but Hexbear users really do have a deep love for each other. Also we are really really ridiculously online.

This is kind of analogous to the "CCP is falsifying all of its own data" allegation. You can cling to some sort of dogmatic narrative like Hexbear inflating its stats à la r/the_donald, that's exceedingly difficult to prove or draw anything conclusive from, or you can take a close look at it and see the reality that lines up with the stats.