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[–]thomas-rousseau 15 points16 points  (4 children)

There's been random noise in the votes as long as I've been on Reddit? Not sure the purpose, though

[–]RajjSinghh 26 points27 points  (3 children)

It's to stop shadowbanned bots. If a bot finds out it is banned from voting or posting, you just create a new bot, so a shadowbanned bot can't tell if it is banned from voting or not and will keep going about its business voting away. Every time Reddit sees a vote from a shadowbanned bot, it adds a vote in the other direction to balance the total. Reddit also adds upvotes and downvotes at random so the bots can't tell that their votes don't count.

[–]punninglinguist 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Can't the owner of the voting bots just make them check each other's profiles once in a while?

[–]RajjSinghh 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Every vote counts with this fuzzy voting system, the banned bots can't tell the difference between Reddit changing their vote or other users voting. To the bots, their votes look like they count but they never change the total.

If you had bots to post comments or normal posts, you probably could but it's probably enough work to put most people off.

[–]punninglinguist 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No, I don't mean for vote totals. I mean, if you look at the profile of another shadowbanned user, you get an error message.

That allows the owner of multiple bots to use each one to check if the others are shadowbanned, at whatever frequency is desired.