In the trivial case, karma farming bots just keep a database of all Reddit history (it is a public dataset, few hundred gigabytes) and repost the top comments (top threads even) whenever they detect a reposted link (extra points for similarity / reverse image searching)
It’s a project I have on the back burner to analyze Reddit history to check what ratio of comments are actually original, and I’d like to build a link aggregator that sorts by novelty.
I've thought about this too, and the fact that I've not seen such a bot so far is pretty unbelievable. It's not a huge amount of work to code it. Working across the whole of Reddit (or HN for that matter), it would gather an ungodly amount of karma (and awards) in a small amount of time.
It’s a project I have on the back burner to analyze Reddit history to check what ratio of comments are actually original, and I’d like to build a link aggregator that sorts by novelty.