I used to be a lot on r/travel. Back then there were posts with pictures that had upvote ls in the triple to quadruple digit range. There were also user questions, usually in the double digits.
Now the majority is just discussions that mysteriously have thousands of upvotes. And some of them quite boring. That must be bots or fakes directly by reddit. No way this happens naturally.
Is this common practice now or is that something r/travel did specifically?
I've said this and I'll say it again. Anyone that's on Reddit still, doesn't make quality content or have comments that are worth a shit. All those people went to mastodon, lemmy or somewhere else. Same applies with facebook, xitter, or any other corpo social media.