After being a site admin I've kinda started to think it isn't all authoritarian. Its bot and manipulation defense. For example, votes are used in the display algorithm. People will write a bot to auto down vote all post. That breaks the site algorithms. Post are not meant to start with negative karma. It screws all kinds of stuff up. People write bots to spam and make their products show up. Its cheaper than paying for advertising. A front page post where millions see it is worth thousands of dollars.

People make 20 accounts and have entire conversations with themselves to make a opinion appear more valid. Its human nature to be more likely to accept a thing if everyone around you agrees with it.

The hard part about enforcing counter measures is its difficult to do it without view point discrimination. You want people yo talk things out for themselves but it be a somewhat mirror of actual humans.