By not going into the database and flipping the sign on that integer.
And before anyone says I'm memeing or otherwise attacking spez without cause: Remember, this is spez. He admitted to directly modifying the database to edit comments of people critical of him once upon a time. He called forth this level of distrust himself.
It'd be a massive fuck you to the community, but how would that be different to what's been going on the last few months?
I'm guessing the company will be like an abusive partner saying "we're in control, you can leave, but we know you won't."
Trying to find a bunch of new mods will probably be an issue. Right now there isn't _too much_ complaining about mods. It's a very fine balance and replacing a bunch of existing ones with new ones might cause mayhem.
So if they look at their analytics later, they will probably discover the comforting fact that only people on 3rd party clients were downvoting the CEO.
I've been a Reddit user for a while, but I never knew this. I tried doing a quick search, but it dates back to 2015 when it seems they were actually disabled all together from the profile page [0].
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/help/comments/2nzzhg/if_i_go_throug...
The really impressive thing is... if you follow a user profile link to a comment and vote, the vote doesn't count.
And it was really hard to see spez's comments without following them from his profile, because they were so downvoted.
So I don't even know how you get down to -1000 on comments.