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?
I used to mod defaults on reddit back around 2011-2015 and only really cared about spammers, so I developed a good eye for it and I’d often report spam on reddit through the formal process, or there were subs like r/thesefuckingaccounts to present spam networks, and a lot of times they would get reported and banned.
In this case the spammer is more aware, and they still operate on the site to some capacity, but they understood they had to be careful and try and hide it/not present it as “spam.” They also basically harassed people who talked about them outside of their own subreddits and try to report and get rid of any negative discussion about them. When they spam it’s like they act as a public figure, but they report as if they are a normal user who’s being doxxed, even though they themselves spread their name(s) around the site. So I created a private subreddit and recruited (sane) people who had been mod-abused by this guy, and we collectively invited more people until we were a few hundred. Most of it was just making fun of him with cheap jokes and people venting, but we had a “current alts” list etc. and would contact mod teams if he was evading a ban with a new account. He only uses the most spammy trash subs now because of this, because any sub that cares about spam or quality of content has banned him many times by now.
I know of a few of these chronically online characters and they generally seem mentally ill in a certain way, so that complicates whether it’s good to directly interact with them or not. There’s a guy named John Mandlbaur who functions on a similar level. He thinks he’s discovered a law of physics is wrong and is everywhere on the internet trying to present his findings for years on end, being a complete asshole to everyone, digging himself into a worse and worse place mentally. I remember someone checked on this reddit spammer in January after the holidays once, and realized on all the days people normally mark by spending time with friends and/or family, he was active on a bunch of his alts the entire time. In all these instances, instead of accepting they may be wrong about even a minor superficial thing, they see it as an affront to their grandiosity and appeal to grand conspiracy theories or very significant things to explain why someone disagrees with them.