This isn't an alt-right or left-wing conspiracy. This is an educated opinion from watching these subs for over a decade, being a mod on one for years, and testing my theory.
The downvote bots show up en masse leading up to US elections. This sub, /r/FloridaGators, and /r/MovieSuggestions have all had run ins with them over the past month, with none in the year prior. They started branching out into non-political subs in 2020.
They downvote everything except those that have keywords that appear to support their causes and upvote those. I actually tested the theory out in 2020 and got the exact response I expected. I can't remember the exact phrases I tried, but I made sarcastic posts with words that otherwise would be a positive and separate non-sarcastic posts towards both major candidates.
The bot picked up on the main keywords, but not the sarcasm. It upvoted both the sarcastic and non-sarcastic posts with the right keywords and downvoted the ones with the other candidate.
There are notably better and smarter bots now. I got a non-political AI promotion bot response to my post here. The Redditor who responded explained what that bot was doing.
I believe the bots downvoting everything are from the prior generation of bots and generally get snuffed out by Reddit fairly quickly.
With the rise of LLMs, modern bots should be much more capable of nuance, like the one that replied to me on the post I linked. It incorporated my own comment and request into its response, as you would expect from a modern bot. (If you care, it described George C Scithers as a modern Fredric Brown and specifically mentioned a couple of non-existent stories. The one I remember was "The Case of the Missing Time Capsule".)
All the major political groups are attempting to game the system. This isn't one side or the other. Some are just better at it than others at any given time and who that is changes all the time.
I was always against removing downs since I felt that was a facebook or twitter thing to do, but if it's giving bots double vote, removing them might be the way to go.
I saw a very strange reddit comment the other day. I don't even remember what sub I was in. It was one of those comments where the person starts ranting uncontrollably mostly off topic in a random sub-thread. It went on and on. It must have been 500+ words long. They were the mod of some non-political sub and they knew (don't ask me how) that political bots infested their sub and the bots were downvoting anything that didn't have political keywords. According to them it happens all over reddit in an election year because the bots are trying to elevate their desired political topics. Crazy ranting can have an element of truth.
Whatever the reality - reddit and subs are r/politics are fascinating dumpster fires of shills, bots, true believers, and passionate fools.
What do you think the bot/dweeb/true believer ratio is on reddit these days?
I found the comment. It was in a fishing thread. Also years ago I tagged him in RES as "/r/MovieSuggestion asshole mod" - haha.
I've seen that a lot, the edits are hard to catch if you're not staring at hours old comments you already moderated multiple times a day.
I was always against removing downs since I felt that was a facebook or twitter thing to do, but if it's giving bots double vote, removing them might be the way to go.
Gotta have the strong moderation crew to back it up or it's just a mess though.
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I saw a very strange reddit comment the other day. I don't even remember what sub I was in. It was one of those comments where the person starts ranting uncontrollably mostly off topic in a random sub-thread. It went on and on. It must have been 500+ words long. They were the mod of some non-political sub and they knew (don't ask me how) that political bots infested their sub and the bots were downvoting anything that didn't have political keywords. According to them it happens all over reddit in an election year because the bots are trying to elevate their desired political topics. Crazy ranting can have an element of truth.
Whatever the reality - reddit and subs are r/politics are fascinating dumpster fires of shills, bots, true believers, and passionate fools.