r/esist was created on Jan 26 as a subreddit to "distill useful information and have discussion on how to best resist the Trump administration and those who enable it."

Its original moderators, i.e. the 3 who were added immediately after the subreddit was created, are brand new accounts.

r/esist has enjoyed great success, growing to a whopping 43k subscribers in a little over a month of life. During that time it has managed, despite its relatively small size, to frontpage regularly. Here is a screenshot of its top posts of all time and here is a screenshot of their subscriber growth.

r/esist's success seems very smooth. They've had one frontpage post on each of these days:

• Feb 10
  
• Feb 13
  
• Feb 14
  
• Feb 15
  
• Feb 16
  
• Feb 17
  
• Feb 18
  
• Feb 19
  
• Feb 20
  
• Feb 21
  
• Feb 22
  
• Feb 23
  
• Feb 24
  
• Feb 25
  
• Feb 26
  
• Feb 27
  
• Feb 28
  
• Mar 03
  

Curiously, the only two gaps in this pristine series are over weekends. They've also never had two frontpage posts on the same day. Most of these frontpage posts happened before the subreddit even reached 30k subscribers, nor does it appear to have a level of activity that would easily explain this frequent success.

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If it's not already evident from the pattern, here's what I think is going on:

• r/esist is an astroturfing subreddit created by ShareBlue, a similar group or extremely dedicated volunteers

• in order to grow, it regularly buys bot upvotes to push one of its posts to the frontpage (the are many well documented services that do this)

• it only ever promotes one post per day, because multiple frontpage posts from the same subreddit are penalized by reddit's algorithm, so as to reach as many potential subscribers as possible