I suspect what they are doing is both, that is to say, talking about what on Reddit would have been called brigading (at least, I suspect this to be the case based on a number of threads I had encountered recently from the shark instance, wherein the majority of comments were from hexbear users), but in a sarcastic way. In this way, they both entertain themselves joking around, while making their actions attractive to more of their own users to join them by making it look like a meme, making them more effective, while also having the cover of "we're just joking" when called out on it.