14 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Crowd Control and Other Safety Updates
A half decade ago (or more), I was told by an admin that the votes fluctuating was to thwart bots & spammers. If a bot/spammer posted a submission and the upvotes never changed, the bot would quickly deduce they've been shadowbanned, or that their post was caught by the spam filter. With the numbers of the actual vote totals fluctuating, a bot or spammer can't be sure if the post just didn't do well, or was pulled by the spam filter.
Obviously a much more sophisticated spammer/bot could get around this, but I would bet this anti-spam feature still tricks quite a few bots.
Comment by saint-lascivious at 03/03/2021 at 08:20 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I don't think it would need to be very sophisticated at all honestly.
The vote fuzzing for individual comments is fairly consistent across a refresh, whereas the fuzzed thread vote count appears to reset to the actual vote count on refresh.