I can understand the desire to get as many downvotes as possible on reddit. I don’t sympathize, but I can at least see where people are coming from. Because Reddit gives you that total and shows it to you.
And I’m sure it’s possible to use an API to really that number up on Lemmy, but “total karma” doesn’t seem to be something Lemmy cares about by default, so where is the motivation coming from?
Is it just the same reason people have always been trolls? Because I’ve never quite understood that, either
Spamming is just a numbers game. The bad actor is likely running a script to automatically post as much as it can before it gets caught and banned and the content deleted. It’s super hard to proactively catch but relatively easy to clean up once it is. The usernames aren’t really a person but just an account used to spam.
There is almost no effort, no cost, and no time spent which is why it’s so prevalent.