Indeed, there's more to it than that. I haven't gone in-depth, so this is my very pedestrian understanding... The very secretive spam filter has cut-outs for '

Indeed, there's more to it than that. I haven't gone in-depth, so this is my very pedestrian understanding... The very secretive spam filter has cut-outs for 'high value' accounts - this isn't really documented formally, but it's pretty obvious that posting limits are essentially nonexistant for 1M+ users, either by design or because they're well known to the mods... The value of the high-karma accounts is that they're much more likely to be accepted for moderator applications. Get enough mods on a default sub, and you basically control the universe. That's very difficult, so the much easier way is to create legit-looking fringe subreddits with names like "newstoday" or "politicallyuncensorednews". Get enough of your smurf accounts to upvote those, and you can get to rising for /all. Get enough real bites and you might even get it to the front page. I haven't really looked into this stuff for a few years, because it's frankly depressing. So my understanding will be a little off what the most recent networks are doing.