Thanks for playing! Really glad the scam with 1.2M upvotes landed. "Popularity as camouflage" was exactly the idea, and the soup podcast is one of my favorites too.
On the checkpoint: yes, the drain is meant to keep running, but at a quarter of the normal rate. The idea is that you stop scrolling and hunt for the stars, and the stars follow the posts they're on. You've made a fair point, though: the banner never actually says "stop and look". It only says scrolling won't help, so chasing stars while you scroll is a natural thing to try, and it ends up testing your aim instead of your judgment. Reverse scroll tells you its rule up front, and the checkpoint should too. Thanks for spelling that out.