5k votes on Reddit you mean? The votes are fluffed by an algorithm, so new posts can float to the top while old posts float to the bottom. The "vote count" is more of a score than an actual vote.

About a year or so back, Reddit did something controversial with the vote system. You used to be able to see how many votes a post or comment got, both positive and negative. You could see how many people supported something and how many people didn't. The admins created a new system that hid those counts, so you only see an overall score. What that effectively did was muddy the whole view as to how well a certain post or comment was actually supported. Now, you could click on the comment sections of an actual post to see the percentage of votes actually supported something, and on controversial posts that got near equal amounts of upvotes and downvotes a dagger would appear. However, to the majority of people, who don't pay attention to those things, they won't take the time to look into those. I think it had an honest, noticeable, and unfortunately negative impact on the flow of discussions.

Edit: There have also been strong accusations and evidence of astroturfing on some of the main subreddits for a long time. /r/news is especially accused of this a lot. The most recent is that a bunch of articles about TPP have allegedly been taken down the past few days.