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?
But upvotes on discussions there are literally 100 times what they used to be just half a year ago. No way that happens naturally.
It’s absolutely Reddit doing that. Buts use API calls, and Reddit has API calls locked down now. Bots have to request access, at the very least.
And given Spez et al’s overwhelmingly stalwart commitment to honesty, transparency, and not fucking over his user base (lol) how are you so sure it’s not Reddit doing that, when that’s exactly what they did to boost numbers when Reddit was new?
Huffman and Ohanian first began Reddit by submitting links from various fake accounts.
B[o]ts use API calls, and Reddit has API calls locked down now.
That is if bots used the API directly, which may or may not be the case. It wouldn’t be that hard to automate using Reddit’s UI. You also had botmakers who relied on the API given months to transfer to webpage scraping.
And while Reddit did create and upvote posts in the beginning, the site seems to be large enough that I don’t see Reddit being able to scale upvotes based on content alone without a massive AI army.