Each one garnered the same hundreds of upvotes as the original, and each bot seemed to be part of a network that was farming karma through this process.
Eerie was an understatement.
I have seen this happen on one of those (former) small niche cozy subs, where it is small enough that people notice their content being recycled. No idea what the goal might be, so I wonder if it is a platform feature to pump-up engagement by automatically reposting content.
What's sad is how many of those aren't bots. It's not uncommon for karma farmers to have their bots upvote each other, but it isn't cost effective to have hundreds (a 1 year old reddit account can run you approx $10 for 1000 post karma). The sad reality is that of those hundreds of upvotes, almost all represent a person who fell for it.
As the saying goes "a lie can be halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on".
Someone who bought a reddit account here, I bought a 2 year old aged account with around 3000 post karma for $10. The karma has lost its value.
That's at least the explanation I've heard many times.
For others, they do it because getting upvotes and reddit awards makes them feel good. They see themselves as community pillars. I suppose this kind of feeds into the above reason in some ways.
If you check /r/games today, you'll see one user is responsible for over half of the submissions. Such accounts are what I mean, where unless they have fine tuned a bot to such a degree, they're really just someone with a little bit too much time on their hands.
I notice a lot of talking past each other in only tangentially related comments. Lately also here on hn.
They’ll find a comment with upvotes rising above its thread neighbors, but with the entire thread neighborhood buried at the bottom of the comment section. Then they’ll just staple that low comment as a response to some visible comment in a thread much higher up the comment section.
That was after I noticed that cat delivering bot I wrote for internal chat appears to have "infinity supply of cats" according to the users, while all it has is a ~200 long list of imgur links that never changes.
