I used to be a lot on r/travel. Back then there were posts with pictures that had upvote ls in the triple to quadruple digit range. There were also user questions, usually in the double digits.
Now the majority is just discussions that mysteriously have thousands of upvotes. And some of them quite boring. That must be bots or fakes directly by reddit. No way this happens naturally.
Is this common practice now or is that something r/travel did specifically?
Bot armies have been all over reddit for years manipulating votes and the larger the community, the larger that problem is.
I think the real reason they got rid of the 3rd party apps is that some apps (particularly the mod tools) make it easier to detect when the site’s own bots are active.
Oh that’s interesting, thanks. I hadn’t considered that or honestly know enough about the mod tools to have considered that.