The first one was botted as well near the end. I know because I wrote a tool to do it in about an hour using my private bot farm I had been building for years. I never gave it to anyone else because it was sloppy and integrated with the bot creation tools I had, and that would have revealed all of the tricks I used to create and protect the bot horde. But I used it myself, and I assume I was far from the only one with the same idea.

The interesting thing is that reddit basically condoned it. They are usually pretty decent at detecting bots if you don't take measures to make them look human, but with place (at least the first time) they seemed to intentionally have that functionality disabled. I kind of assumed that they doing it specifically as a bit detection scheme, but they never cleaned house afterwards like I expected.