I can only speak to the one (top 10 by subscriber count) subreddit I am a "mod" in, but they also routinely engage in vote manipulation to control what their front page looks like through a more "organic" approach (edit: rather) than simple thread deletion. I'm sure this goes on in all of the major ones.
Not to mention rules are inconsistently enforced, rule breaking that aligns with moderator ideology tends to get shifted to the bottom of the priority stack.
No, sorry for not clarifying. They would share links with "upvote this please" in moderator only channels to push things to the top of the subreddit. Which afaik is against reddit TOS.
Not to mention rules are inconsistently enforced, rule breaking that aligns with moderator ideology tends to get shifted to the bottom of the priority stack.