"We want to better communicate the scale of Reddit to our users."
If that's true why did they hide vote numbers on comments and posts? It used to say "xxx upvotes xxx downvotes" now it just gives a number and hides that.
That be easy to test though if you were bot was effective or not, just post to unpopular subreddits, make bot votes on those submissions, then check back the next day. If votes not counted, then your bot is being ignored and you'd move on to changing your IP address or building your next bot or such.
It's a poor method of deterring bots written by people with very little experience writing such bots. Botting reddit is really easy, you'll just want lots of IPs so something like luminati.
Reddit is definitely not a paragon of anti-bot engineering, I think most of those skills exist in adtech.
Suppose there's a comment with 12 upvotes and 207 downvotes. Now suppose you're reddit and you want to make this comment seem more popular than it actually is.
You could slowly remove the downvotes, but attentive people refreshing the page will see the number shrinking and become suspicious, because real users never suddenly do a mass retraction of their votes.
You could slowly add a bunch of upvotes, but then people will wonder why this comment with a consistent 12/207 popularity ratio for the past hour suddenly overcame it and became the most popular comment in the thread. People will suspect a coordinated raid took place.
Both approaches raise too much suspicion. The safest approach is to turn off the ability to view the separate upvote/downvote values altogether and use a simple easing function to artificially increase the comment's total score over time. When no one can see the upvote/downvote ratio or the volume of vote activity over time, they lose the ability to judge whether manipulation is taking place.
You need an excuse for the change, so don't forget to also come up with a spurious narrative about how it was supposedly done to fight bots.
Except that vote fuzzing was always a thing, so when you'd see 1000 upvotes and 100 downvotes, that could be off by an enormous amount (I think a reddit admin said by a factor of 5x or 10x in extreme cases, ie. frontpage posts).
...because it's almost certainly a lie. It's because they want to better communicate the scale of Reddit to their customers - the companies on the other side of the links who they are driving content to.
It's way easier to say "Hey, we're giving you XYZ traffic, give us ABC dollars," when you have the figures in front of you rather than just upvote/downvote numbers.
https://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq#wiki_how_is_a_submission.27s...