Infamously u/Unidan, a very popular figure on r/askscience posting high-quality answers to biology questions, was banned from Reddit when it was revealed that he used alt accounts to upvote himself/downvote those he was arguing against. Such a shame that he felt the need to resort to something so stupid.
It wasn't stupid. It's quite likely that he would have been stuck down in the noise like so many other high quality Reddit posters except that he realized early on that just a handful of early upvotes makes all of the difference to Reddit's algorithm. The Reddit algorithm is seemingly designed to snowball content, so if you want to rake in the worthless karma reliably you need alts.
I’m not so sure. Many other "household names" on askscience seem to be highly upvoted, apparently without shenanigans (but who knows?!) Even I have several 1000+ karma answers there, and many more 100+ ones and I’m a nobody. There’s also simply not that much competition on askscience! If you’re consistently able to write good, a-few-paragraph answers to questions in a particular field, and are also available for discussion and followup questions, it’s not that difficult to become commonly recognized and reap a lot of karma there without having to compete against others.
I think you may be underestimating the effect of this. With time, you can get several 1000-karma posts, but I bet you also have a bunch of 1-10 point things. Literally every comment and post that u/Unidan made had 100+ upvotes. He could comment about birds on a quantum physics page and get 100's of upvotes. As a result, everywhere he posted, people would see all of his comments "organically," and that kept all of his posts outside of the 1-karma hell that consumes a lot of amazing insight. That's the effect of bot usage.
