[wayoutthere]

You can sell high-karma accounts or leverage them into mod positions. For whatever reason people take high-karma accounts to be a signal of quality (or at least activity). Mod positions on large subs are used to signal-boost corporate social media campaigns (ever notice how a bunch of fast and furious memes always pop up across a ton of subreddits a month before the movie comes out?) There’s money in that and it’s basically the same role and business model as a social media influencer on Instagram.

Some people also do it for the lulz, it’s not that hard to build a bot using markov chains (there are plenty of Reddit comment datasets you can image match to the same meme, which is an interesting engineering project for someone wanting to learn those methods).