I've been noticing the number of upvotes on posts fluctuate wildly...from 12, to 350, to 150. Pretty wild swings. I know fuzzing is needed to combat bots, but I had thought it was more like at the few % level, not orders of magnitude...
It’s a bug. One of many related to how the UI updates in real time using websockets. The good news is they are getting rid of websockets in the next release, and should fix a lot of these issues.
I doubt there’s any deliberate vote fuzzing here—reddit did that to prevent karma-farming bots from figuring out if they were being detected and blocked, but with no permanent karma, that shouldn’t be an issue here.