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It's to deter bots. The numbers weren't previously accurate, they were fuzzed (also to deter bots).

https://www.reddit.com/wiki/faq#wiki_how_is_a_submission.27s...

I don't quite see the connection. How exactly does this deter bots?

It's difficult to see if their votes are counting, allowing Reddit to silently-ignore their votes without them knowing.

Can't you just delay updating the count by some random number of minutes/hours?

That be easy to test though if you were bot was effective or not, just post to unpopular subreddits, make bot votes on those submissions, then check back the next day. If votes not counted, then your bot is being ignored and you'd move on to changing your IP address or building your next bot or such.

There's no reason this exact same method won't work given their current practice though.

It's a poor method of deterring bots written by people with very little experience writing such bots. Botting reddit is really easy, you'll just want lots of IPs so something like luminati.

Reddit is definitely not a paragon of anti-bot engineering, I think most of those skills exist in adtech.

Yup. Attribution's king in adtech.

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