[13of40]

Maybe this is already well-known, but I saw another behavior recently on some subrreddits where a lot of new posts are seemingly getting a single downvote to a score of zero. I suspected there was some troll doing it, so I went down the line and gave about 20 or 30 of them a single up vote back to one, refreshed the page, and most of them had immediately gone back to zero. I think the mods must have a button for squashing a post without actually deleting it, and on some subs they use it for a huge number of the posts.

[thatguy0900]

There is also just a massive amount of bots on reddit. Unidan, a old famous redditor, was involved in a controversy where he would use bots to down vote all the posts made at the same time as his own posts so that his posts would be more visible. He's not the only one doing things like that

[richbell]

There are a LOT of bots, yes. Pretty much any submission that makes it to /r/all had a high likelihood of:

- being a submitted by bot reposting popular posts

- having comments from bots that repost popular comments from prior submissions

Though I'm pretty sure Unidan just logged into alternate accounts and downvoted things manually.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/2c9ida/reca...

[schwartzworld]

Those numbers are fuzzed. You don't see the actual exact number of votes.

[traverseda]

/r/3Dprinting has no such button for what it's worth. If there is they haven't given it to me.

[richbell]

They've added custom CSS to hide it, it isn't actually removed. You can easily bypass this by disabling custom CSS or using a mobile app.

[Seattle3503]

13of40 was talking about a single button that mass downvotes multiple comments. None of the default (nor popular) clients support this functionality, but you could script your own version using the reddit API.

[richbell]

Oh, I guess I misinterpreted that because it's a bizarre speculation.

Shwartzworld is correct, the votes are fuzzed and deliberately fluctuate so that it's difficult for bots to tell whether they've been detected.

[13of40]

I was talking about a button that sets the score for a single submission to zero and makes it stick. I know the numbers are fuzzed, but I don't think fuzzing will take something with a score of 1 and show it as 0.

[richbell]

I highly doubt such a button exists.

> I don't think fuzzing will take something with a score of 1 and show it as 0.

If one or more people decided to mass downvote new submissions (which isn't exactly uncommon), or the submissions are controversial, they will show as 0 even if they're actually -/+ 2 (for example).

If you decided to mass upvote them you will initially see the total increment by one, however, subsequent refreshes will show you fuzzed numbers. I believe the more active you are (e.g., upvoting 30 posts in the span of a minute), the more aggressive the fuzziness will be.

[kibwen]

> I think the mods must have a button for squashing a post without actually deleting it

No, Reddit does not provide such a feature. And setting up an outside bot farm to hide posts makes no sense for mods who can already just delete a post outright.