You just make it very hard for me to respect you.
Look - I'm not Mr. Miyagi and you're not Daniel-San. You didn't ask for my Karate help and I'm not offering. But you are trying to teach each other the Crane Kick for no better reason than to impress each other in the school parking lot. The Cobra Kai isn't even after you.
The Admins don't give the first fuck about Reddit. They don't give the first fuck about its users. And they don't give the first fuck what you do, so long as you continue to add page views and links to external content so that their pagerank climbs. Not a one of them has the first clue about social media or online relationships - they view each and every one of you as an errant line of code. When a handful of you stepped out of line, they literally commented you out of the code. That's how it's done. They open the hood and add your username and/or IP to the list of usernames and IPs that are invisible.
It's an inhuman and inefficient solution to a simple problem: Reddit motivates through meaningless internet points and awards those points most efficiently for gaming the system. If you look at the early philosophy of Reddit, it's clearly "Sockpuppet your way to success." It's in the DNA. And you may or may not know this, but Reddit has been "mostly" open-source for five years now - "mostly" because the only parts they've kept closed are their anti-spam measures, which they have locked down tighter than the W88. Trust me - I've probably spent 20 hours on the phone with Admins, 40 hours on chat, and half a day in their offices. They'll tell you about anything except the methods that keep Reddit from turning into this.
Here's the secret: They have no secrets. They have no methods. All they have is people diligently commenting users out of the code. The difference between Reddit and Webtoid is curation and shooting people in the dark. And remember - they aren't "people people." They're coders.
You've figured it out. You can get a gajillion points on Reddit without breaking a sweat. What you haven't figured out is that anyone with half an interest in getting a gajillion points can do it - Karmanaut would openly and freely state his methods to anyone who asked back when he gave up on his old accounts and lemme tell ya - all/hot/1hr isn't rocket science. The thing of it is, Reddit isn't engineered to thwart you. It's engineered to presume you don't give a shit.
Think of Reddit like a pinball machine without a tilt sensor. I used to like to play it to see where the ball would go, to see what strange noises it would make, to see what it would teach me about life. Most of you guys in here? You like to grab the bottom and roll the ball through the 5000 point gate again and again and again because you like to hear the same monotonous ding ding ding.
And we could all get along except for the fact that there's only one Reddit, and it's either your Reddit or mine.
You're winning. Shit, you won over a year ago.
I wrote a long, impassioned plea against reposts two years ago. Someone somewhere or other quoted it every week for the better part of two years. Then the guy who submitted it to /r/bestof deleted his account; the guy who submitted the repost deleted his account. That plea is now unsearchable because the Admins haven't indexed comments for nearly two years so sorting by "top" doesn't find two thirds of what I've written.
Which, really, is okay, because it was a plea to not let Reddit sink into a miasma of triviality, which it most certainly has. Triviality, you see, makes for easier points. What I wrote is no longer topical. Much like Benazir Bhutto warning of the ascendancy of the Taliban in 1989, it doesn't fucking matter 12 years past 9/11. That ship has sailed. Looking back on it, it makes me feel melancholy that we used to care. We used to worry about the future. We used to strive to prevent exactly this from happening.
I'm sorry to break this to you, but you aren't practicing the Crane Kick. You're practicing The Dougie. And what used to be a dojo for debate has become a dance floor for dorks.
I've said my peace. I won't be saying it again. Thanks for your time, and carry on.