This is mostly another fix of bad design that was added in Reddit's early years, but people have started to notice the aggressive vote fuzzing as it was calibrated for a much smaller userbase.
At the least, this will break statistical analysis of Reddit data for awhile since the public datasets will not have their scores updated, which I in particular am not happy about. :p
Complaints like this are the reason companies are reluctant to release public datasets. They don't have any obligation to release data, but they do. It's a gift. If they have to consider "how will this change affect the consumers of our public data releases?" every time they make a change, they're going to stop releasing public datasets.
For clarity, the Reddit datasets are not released by Reddit itself, but scraped through the API. (More context/examples of what I do with the data: http://minimaxir.com/2015/10/reddit-bigquery/ )
At the least, this will break statistical analysis of Reddit data for awhile since the public datasets will not have their scores updated, which I in particular am not happy about. :p