I used to be a lot on r/travel. Back then there were posts with pictures that had upvote ls in the triple to quadruple digit range. There were also user questions, usually in the double digits.
Now the majority is just discussions that mysteriously have thousands of upvotes. And some of them quite boring. That must be bots or fakes directly by reddit. No way this happens naturally.
Is this common practice now or is that something r/travel did specifically?
Cheap, easy, impossible for outsiders to quantify, approaching IPO and cash to be made, keeping ad revenue the same without revealing how many actual users have fled the site, etc.
Or just change how upvotes are counted and displayed; no bot is needed. Reddit doesn’t publish exact upvote and downvote numbers and hasn’t for a while.
It also gives Reddit more control at a higher level to tweak certain numbers in certain subs.
For vote manipulation, no.
For faking user engagement and creating content and pretending like hordes of actual humans haven’t left and real eyes are actually looking at all these ads, yes.