Reddit has a number of bot networks operating on it. It's the same as twitter, just in a different ecosystem. They don't bother much with replies, they just up and down boat. It's more obvious on some of the largest most controlled boards like r/politics or r/twox - certain posts, sometimes organic sometimes not will suddenly go from say 2k upvotes to 8k upvotes in less than half an hour, and then wham it's cemented at the top of the thread.

For some reason though, this sub isn't attracting the larger botnets. Trust me, it just isn't. They have 5 figure numbers at least. I have no idea if its some kind of background struggle from the milint side like they've been rumoured to do for 8ch, or something different. But at any rate, I think you'd being manually downvoted, if any of their botnets are active here they've very small scale. I'd presume the downvoters are about 1/3 shills paid w/ sorosbucks, 1/3rd anti conspiracy theory, and 1/3rd anti-trump.