Is there actual evidence of this? My experience is those in r/the_donald claim the numbers are artificially deflated by Reddit, and those on the other side claim r/the_donald is mostly bots. I suspect both views are wrong.

At one point reddit had an inconsistency between the normal interface and the one shown to advertisers. This revealed that the counts in the normal interface were being suppressed by a factor of 10, likely related to keeping the posts off of /r/all.

I guess an alternate explanation is a 10x inflation in the advertising interface, but that would be defrauding the advertisers.

Unlike most subreddits, their upvote count to comment ratio is really out of whack.

Usually a pretty reliable sign of botism. You see it on corporate driven posts on movie promotions a decent amount too. (Along with some pretty lame top voted comments)

The subreddit's culture for years has been based on aggressively upvoting everything posted there. This started back when it was small and the community tried to get pro-Trump posts on the front page of Reddit, which invariably caused a lot of drama. So I don't think this means anything.

The fact that the activity has been happening for years doesn't invalidate that it could be bot related. Also the fact that reddit admins had to change their site algorithms to remove it from aggregated results, because posts were being gamed to the front page, implies that the behavior was not normal human traffic.

> Also the fact that reddit admins had to change their site algorithms to remove it from aggregated results, because posts were being gamed to the front page, implies that the behavior was not normal human traffic.

It implies it's unusual traffic, but it does not imply it's inhuman traffic -- doubly so because the difference has already been explained in a way that doesn't require invoking bots.

Somewhat amusingly, after r/the_donald discovered it could push pro-Trump memes onto r/all by making every post on the subreddit about upvoting content, some other subreddits managed to pull off the same stunt in protest.

Yes, I agree, their culture is contrary to the basic functioning of an online forum.

Your position seems to have backtracked from concern over bots to... disliking lots of upvotes within a community. Forgive me if I think you're being disingenuous with this latest statement.

Reflexively upvoting everything that comes into a sub is a bad cultural value. It may even break reddits' usage policy.

I'm not backtracking, you're the one who brought up that reflexively upvoting might be indistinguishable from botlike behavior. It's a feature (cultural value), not a bug.

Would they be that obvious? There was an absence of actual discussion on the_donald threads I read. Just agreement or telling dissenters they were idiots. It was weird but could that be because of bots or just a lower level of discourse.

They’ve not paid much cost for their behavior in the past so why would they change?

Anyone who was not 100% supportive of everything Trump did/does was removed through banning.

And you think that doesn’t happen in liberal subreddits? I’ve been banned from /politics /News /worldnews all for disagreeing with people. All near instant bans. I’ve even been banned from non political forums because I shared unpopular view points, such as “femisnism has hurt dating dynamics”. Yes that got me banned. So you know full well wrongful and politically motivated bans happen all the time from both sides. So it’s a moot point.

/news and /worldnews are hardly liberal. /news leans pretty conservative on many days.

I swear there are bots on the news channels run by various interest groups. But never have been able to prove it.