I think most people have failed to see what really happened: reddit is controlled by bots, automation tools, and social media companies. There is a silent partnership between reddit and those companies, and there are rivalries between them, but they all have sophisticated tools that allow them to create accounts, farm for karma, and then boost / shutdown stories and comments that align with their client's interests.

There is absolutely no reason for an obscure thread in a 50k subscriber subreddit to attract dozens of upvotes / downvotes, but it consistently happens if you engage with one of the social media accounts. They monitor their user accounts, and if their message gets challenged, they sent out a distress call. Anonymous accounts arrive and "correct" the conversation.

For me the strangest event was when someone known as Human Controller posted a video of an alleged self-solving Rubik's Cube. There were several videos, but the big seller was one made for Tested, where the cube was shown a a "Bay Area Maker Fair". Dozens of random accounts would reply with comments like, "Oh, I see you were at the maker fair," or "I just saw this at the maker fair." The video itself was a Michael Bay's Transformers production quality fake, but everyone insisted that it was legitimate. Of course there were plenty of real people contributing to the votes, but supported by the invisible social media hand.

(Human Controller eventually posted a floating cube as a not-so-subtle spoiler of the video manipulation.)