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?
Reddit has quite literally been using them since they were first founded. To get the site off the ground, links, votes & engagement was artificially populated for years as the userbase grew. Reddit has never been organic. And anyone who believes reddit ever stopped manipulating those numbers after their “seed phase” to make the site look better is no more than a sweet summer child.