This is an irrelevant tangent, but bots reposting content which previously was highly upvoted reminds me of exponential backoff in networking. The reposting ser

This is an irrelevant tangent, but bots reposting content which previously was highly upvoted reminds me of exponential backoff in networking. The reposting serves as an automated way to maximally spread popular content to the widest range of website visitors, until the value of additional reposts diminishes and the bots reduce their reposting frequency on that item because it's no longer hitting the highs. It probably doesn't work out that way in practice since the karma farming bots may not be that sophisticated, but I think it's a cool idea at least.