Avoiding ostracism is even easier than you suggest. On forums like reddit, spammers, trolls, and shills routinely purchase high-reputation accounts, then use that reputation to further their agenda. Those accounts are frequently banned or downvoted into oblivion, but the cost of jumping to another account is often trivial compared to the amount of damage done.

I don't have a silver bullet for such a problem (and neither does reddit,) but it's worth knowing about as we build a community here.