The API is a reason why I _love_ Reddit. Being able to moderate my communities tools I can write has been a savior more times than I can count.

> I started questioning what was even real.

The votes aren't real and they don't matter. This is true for FB likes or whatever else you can imagine. Reddit goes to a LOT of trouble to counter bad actors, but if you're in some subreddit that you think is full of abuse, then it's like any other part of the internet. Go somewhere else. This has little to do with Reddit as a whole, so the proclamation seems unnecessarily volatile.

Out of interest in this I made Https://linksforreddit.com. You can view who links to certain articles. I backed up and truncated the 2017 data because the VPS ran out of space but there where and are interesting patterns. Nothing proof like but the same pdfs sometimes get linked close to a hundred times by similar themed and structured essays but textually different comments.

How do you change opinions using that? Would it be an illegitimate way to change someone's opinion?

I think what they're describing are propaganda bots. If so, what you're asking is how does propaganda work, and is it not legitimate?

Yes. Voting patterns, for example, how do those change people's opinions? It would seem that the most they could do is give an impression of what comments are and are not well received. Do people base much of their opinions on that? In which direction?