> In my experience this hasn't been the case at all. I've also noticed that if you click the profile of people that end up on the front page, they are often new (or suddenly active) accounts with a certain pattern:
You make a great point. It's highly unlikely that a newly-created account just so happens to post content that's engaging enough to be featured in Reddit's frontpage. It's far more likely that these "less popular Reddit users" are sock puppet accounts used to post special-purpose content which is then subjected to industrial-grade boosting to force it onto everyone's first page.
Changes of this magnitude are practically impossible without the backing of either Reddit itself or marketing companies intending to control the flow of information.
Exactly - and it's important to make a distinction between the bots that post comments and posts, and the much larger and more influential bot farms that manipulate content (both promoting and demoting).
Personally, I'm fairly certain it's a difficult cat-and-mouse game, but there's no question that some very popular mods also use bot farms to promote the content they want on the subs they mod.
You make a great point. It's highly unlikely that a newly-created account just so happens to post content that's engaging enough to be featured in Reddit's frontpage. It's far more likely that these "less popular Reddit users" are sock puppet accounts used to post special-purpose content which is then subjected to industrial-grade boosting to force it onto everyone's first page.
Changes of this magnitude are practically impossible without the backing of either Reddit itself or marketing companies intending to control the flow of information.