I just spent two hours up voting 1 star reddit reviews on Google play and thumbsdowning 5 star reviews

This is just chaotic good stuff right here. You know, I was just thinking the other day what if say 10,000 of us could form a coalition on Google search results and contest many of the Reddit results as just being hot trash to the point that they get nearly removed from Google results? Without that free Google traffic we could finally watch Reddit die a quicker and much deserved death.

I think they have stuff to detect and ignore brigading, which would probably especially apply to platforms as large as Reddit.

One of the many, many, problems with Reddit is that 1 upvote does not equal 1 upvote. Countless times I’ve found a days old post and or a comment that’s like 15 deep in a chain that no one else is possibly viewing, and up/down voted it. The UI shows the number changing, but if you then immediately (or much later) check it in an incognito browser you often can see that it didn’t change.

I assume it’s some weird anti bot voting algorithm, but it consistently applies to my very real accounts so it’s definitely not working as intended.

Yeah "karma" isn't karma if the number doesn't change. It has been bullshit for awhile. When Steven "Spez" Huffman made it so you couldn't downvote his, the mods, or other chump ass users into oblivion because of their useless fucking takes on things the site quit having any air of democracy. It is all just a power grab for useless brownie points to make them look better when in all actuality puddles have more depth than most Reddit users anymore.
Some years ago, they changed the algorithm. It used to be hundreds and low thousands votes, then they changed and the vote counts went up thousands. Somehow they weighted votes but I don't remember any specifics. I'm sure there are still some posts out there with conversations.
they definitely are monitoring the upvotes, if they can label some as a bannable or warn-able offense.

Reddit's voting and moderation design is basically flawed, and the parts of that which Lemmy has copied are flawed in exactly the same way.

Any system that requires people to be in a position of power, yet not abuse that power, is broken.

I'm not saying that it's the best solution, but when I used to use Slashdot, it seems like it would randomly ask people to moderate comments (who had opted in), rather than have preset moderators. And then presumably, they would collate the results of multiple moderators and use that to decide who could be trusted with more moderation.

This is one example of a method to avoid power tripping mods.

Slashdot also let mods mark comments as funny, insightful, spam, etc.
As a reader you could sort by these and read it for the laughs or read it for the education. In hindsight that system was ahead of its time.
Why do you think slashdot didn't become mainstream?
- My take is that Slashdot's vision was of a single community, which limited its scale.
- funny or insightful is a nice way to go about it