As many of you already know, reddit has decided to disable individual up/down vote counts. In the announcement, Deimorz explained that reddit's vote manipulation and spam countermeasures were creating a false impression of controversy and returning artificially low up/down ratios.

In a thread on /r/TheoryOfReddit, Deimorz defends the decision by giving a very specific recent example where a user was using dozens alts to increase the popularity of their posts in a small subreddit.

For context, /u/SocratesLives died for that shit three weeks ago, after an intrepid AMRista/FRDbroker noticed really suspicious voting patterns on submissions to /r/FeMRADebates.

• edit: Screenshot of admin response for proof

Now it goes without saying that none of this is confirmed, but keep in mind what we know about FRD and SocratesLives' conduct while reading Deimorz's anecdote:

As a specific example, a little while ago, a small subreddit (where a post getting 15 points or so is pretty good) had someone create about 40 bots to downvote everything submitted there shortly after it was posted. No matter what it was, everything would get about 40 downvotes almost right away. The bots weren't very sophisticated, so our anti-cheating measures were disregarding all of their votes, and they weren't actually having any effect on the posts' rankings at all. However, because of the way the anti-cheating stuff works (we don't want people running bots to realize their votes aren't doing anything), even though the votes don't affect the ranking, we still leave the 40 downvotes there, and slowly counterbalance them with 40 "fake" upvotes. So the post gradually moves back to its actual score of 0, and will eventually look as though it has 40 upvotes and 40 downvotes, even if nobody has actually upvoted it yet.

As I said, the subreddit was quite small, and getting 15 points was pretty good. So let's say this post does really well, and ends up getting 18 points. However, because of the bots, it looks like it was 58/-40. This both makes the submitter/author feel like their post was hated by a lot of people, and gives the impression that nothing's being done about the downvote bots. People are constantly worrying about brigades / bots / users following them around / etc. because seeing the up and down counts gives them access to information that they don't have any insight into the accuracy of (and it's really not accurate at all a lot of the time).

[All bold mine] [screenshot]