looking further into it, in this situation i seem to be a dimwit and stand corrected
botting likes on the devforum is such a weird choice of place to do it, but doing it to an announcement post (one that nobody wanted) is such a weirdly particular place to test on too
Probably some other user not related to staff did this, it’s a common method in social media to do some bots like/support a really disliked post so the blame falls on the OP itself
Also funny enough with all these bots the post still got ratio’ed