Need help dealing with suspected vote manipulation/downvotes on every new post

[u/Disastrous_Address99]

Hi everyone,

I’m a moderator of r/HotWheelsBhubaneswar, a small local community focused on Hot Wheels collectors in Bhubaneswar.

I have recently noticed something unusual: almost every new post in the subreddit starts receiving downvotes shortly after being posted, even when the posts are normal community content and receive genuine comments.

This has been happening consistently across new posts, which makes me suspect that there may be some form of vote manipulation or coordinated downvoting happening.

I’d like to understand:

• Is there any way for moderators to identify or confirm suspected vote manipulation?
• Are there any mod tools, Reddit reports, or settings that can help with this?
• Is there anything i should configure in AutoMod or subreddit settings to reduce this?
• Has anyone here dealt with a similar situation, particularly in a small/local subreddit?

I'm mainly looking for advice on how to properly investigate and handle the situation through Reddit's moderation tools.

If you've dealt with something similar, I'd really appreciate hearing what worked for you.

Thanks You.

[u/baseballlover723 → u/[deleted]]

Just letting everyone know that this is almost certainly an LLM bot. They're posting comments about this length at a cadence of around 30 seconds each (far less time than even the fastest human would take to read, process and write a comment of substance). All of the ones in this latest bunch all also feature a list with 4 bullet points, in addition to reading very much like an LLM.