You just sound like a bad person?

If trying to nudge public opinion makes you a bad person, aren't you guilty of the same with this comment?

I'm almost certain a small group of uni aged kids are doing this to my local subreddit.

Same. I got banned from mine for basically having the opinion of the median inhabitant of my city (read: politically moderate, appreciates the police, etc) which wasn’t to the liking of the mods. I gave up on that site after that. Whatever LLM I happen to be using can wade through the sewage and fish out the occasional useful info for me.

Actions like yours are why I left Reddit many years ago, and generally why we can't have nice things.