What are "brigading" and "vote brigades" in cultural, not just policy, terms?

Brigading, in cultural terms, is the practice of organized groups crossing from their home community into a different community to influence its voting and comment dynamics. While Reddit's site rules prohibit coordinated vote manipulation, the cultural phenomenon is broader than what the policy explicitly covers. At its core, brigading represents the collision of two different communities' norms, with one group attempting to override the other's native social order. It happens most naturally when a post from one subreddit gets linked to another as an example of something worth mocking, correcting, or celebrating. Readers of the linking community follow the link, bring their own cultural assumptions, and vote and comment in ways that reflect their values rather than those of the community they are visiting. The original thread's comment section shifts — high-effort responses from community regulars get buried under waves of outsider reactions, and the discussion stops reflecting the host community. Culturally, brigading is experienced as invasion. Communities develop internal norms, shared vocabulary, and discussion standards over time, and a sudden influx of outsiders with different values feels disruptive regardless of whether any explicit rules are broken. It is why subreddits sometimes go private temporarily after being linked from large platforms — they are protecting their culture rather than just complying with policy. Vote brigading in the narrower sense — where a community explicitly organizes to mass-downvote a specific user or thread — carries a mob quality that many users find ethically troubling even when the target is someone genuinely objectionable. It is the Reddit equivalent of a pile-on: the punishment becomes disproportionate to any offense, and the anonymity of the voting mechanism makes the behavior feel consequence-free for participants. Understanding brigading culturally means recognizing it as a manifestation of tribal dynamics rather than just a rule violation.