I suspect that on Reddit, when you make a thread and notice it quickly gets downvoted, whats actually happening is someone else just posted their own thread and downvoted all the other ones on /new in hopes boosting visibility of their own thread. And all the authors of all the other threads on /new did the same thing, leading to every thread initially being heavily downvoted. Probably one of the reasons why Reddit removed seeing how many points below Zero a thread gets.