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 also seen weird upvote/comment ratios on Lemmy, but I think there are still bugs in the system.
I have seen a post with a sus upvote count and no comments from a different instance. When I view it on the post's home instance, I see plenty of comments from users who's instances that are federated with mine, but my instance's version of the post has few or no comments. It's happened more than once, but I bet it's just temporary strangeness at play when it happens.