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If you've heard of 'karma farming', you know that Reddit upvotes can be gamed. There are numerous accounts that accumulate upvotes (similar to HN commenter score) by simply reposting popular posts from 4-6 weeks ago, aka the right amount of time for most daily users to forget that they had previously seen it. Usually this would occur on high-volume, high-density subreddits like r/pics, r/funny etc where there are lots of new posts each day.

Then, those high karma accounts can be used to astroturf on more valuable real estate, the sections of Reddit where people ask for product recommendations. Posts made by high karma accounts are given greater visibility in the Reddit algorithm, which correlates to a higher number of upvotes as more people see it in their feed.




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