An odd way of manipulating Reddit

A couple of years ago one of my subreddits suddenly attraced a huge number of new subscribers overnight. I have four or five subreddits where I post links, all of them with a couple of dozen subscribers; I have no idea who these people are and why they would be subscribing to what is explicitly a distributed personal bookmark list.

One day I posted an article about the origins of COVID, by a long-standing science writer named Nicholas Wade. By random coincidence it is his birthday today; he must be in his 80s. The article in question, while doubtless controversial at the time, is of course written in normal literary standard English rather than breathless Alex Jones-ese or the cant of the dog-on-a-string brigade. But brigade is what transpired: about 980 accounts subscribed to my "InformationPolicy" subreddit, dwarfing the audience about 40 that had gradually accreted to that point.

And this group, whoever they are, have occasionally kerb-stomped the visibility of future posts they don't like. They don't comment; I don't know if they're real people or a bot swarm. But they can stop any other posts ever propagating out of my subreddit with their huge numbers.

Now I'm not on Reddit to build an audience at all: it's simply a distributed bookmark store for me so I can find URLs years later. Odd though that even non-entities like me sometimes trigger these draconian but subtle "containment" interventions.