Teppic

Some people use apps which hide posts they have interacted with. A downvote counts as interaction so people in turn then liberally downvote nearly everything. Yes it’s unhelpful and dumb. Solution, use kbin and at least you can see who downvoted you! (Except I don’t think downvotes are federated).

Actually… Reddit was open source until 2017.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit
But the rest of your comment still stands.

Humans would browse anonymously, and then if/when they make an account they will test things like making comments, upvotes etc.
Take a looks at this instance:
https://the-federation.info/node/details/48405#
https://picify.podycust.co.uk/
45k+ accounts (rising fast) and it’s a ghost town. 9 posts, 33 comments.

But the question “why” strands. 200 upvotes will get you on the front page at the moment. Why not stop there, why make your bot accounts so conspicuous that they are basically garenteed to get deleted?

They’ve just spoon fed us the data to help us identify them, and given us incentive to do so too. It just seems counter productive.

It seems almost certain that there are farms creating these accounts - but why? The sheer volume of them is going to make them easy to identify and delete, and if the admins of the instances don’t delete them the instances will be defederated in short order.
I fail to see any value to having 1 million+ bot accounts. What are we missing?