I've been out of the loop for a few years, but no the votes aren't manipulated.
But the normalisation algorithm https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/norma... does prefer to get one at least of each subreddit. This means that if /r/blog has a post it will probably be placed on the front page immediately. That action gets it a lot of votes just because it's very visible.
But the normalisation algorithm https://github.com/reddit/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/lib/norma... does prefer to get one at least of each subreddit. This means that if /r/blog has a post it will probably be placed on the front page immediately. That action gets it a lot of votes just because it's very visible.