The programming is pretty clever. The early down-votes are instantaneous, but afterwards they rise in proportion to the number of up-votes. After it reaches a threshold of popularity, the proportional down-voting stops and the post is allowed to rise.

This does not appear to be vote brigading - as in, rallying genuine users to vote on content in other subs. It appears to be consistent and widespread, which points to the use of bots using generated and hijacked accounts.

Keep talking about it. The owners of Reddit know this is happening and they're allowing it intentionally. The more you talk about it the more their user-base will turn against them.

How do you know they know?

I don't mean to evade the question, but how could they not know?

By not wanting to know.

Same difference.

• Reddit’s empire is founded on a flawed algorithm

• How Reddit Got Huge: Tons of Fake Accounts

• How Reddit's cofounders built Reddit with an army of fake accounts

Interesting how he recognized, then, that the lack of censorship helped Reddit to grow.

I think now censorship will be what kills Reddit.

It's starting to get a tad out of hand.

When you have the same mods in the top subs, who bring with them blatant conflicts of interest & a track record for arbitrary censorship or worse (trolling) you're essentially allowing the site to degenerate into the next Digg.com, to lose all credibility it once had and basically piss off all of the decent, honest people who helped make the site what it is today.

I disagree. I think the old mods did a much better job than the new ones. I was looking at the mod list on/r/politics. I only recognized one of the names. Only two of them had been mods for more than a year, and most of them for less than six months. A whole new mod regime has been brought in to implement censorship there.

In r/politics, specifically, I would agree, regarding the hostile takeover of the sub leading to censorship, sure.

In other subs, however, such as r/news you have mods like BipolarBear0 who has openly admitted to organizing a vote brigade in the past with the sole intent of manipulating content, who 'bends the rules' to remove any content he disagrees with, who also happens to moderate dozens of other subs as well, for some inexplicable reason. Being the statist that he is, I find it bizarre that he was able to become a mod of r/restorethefourth, in spite of this. It's almost reminiscent of a prior mod of r/occupywallstreet who turned out to be an informant.

In r/technology the mods have taken it a step further, putting filters in place to remove content arbitrarily based on keywords (more censorship), who often appear to remove any content they perceive their government would disagree with.

:(

Yes, I know. It's all rather disheartening. Once again, those in power have exploited their assets to dominate the narrative and censor that which doesn't fit their given narrative. At least, to an extent. While they may have been able to position these gatekeepers into the larger subs, as they had done in the mainstream media, the smaller subs as with independent media remain largely uncensored, and for the most part unbeholden to their agenda.

the smaller subs as with independent media remain largely uncensored, and for the most part unbeholden to their agenda.

So far. But they are working on them as well.

I'm sure they are. In regards to moderation, that will certainly vary. OWS has been infiltrated prior, r/restorethefourth is currently co-moderated by BipolarBear0, etc.

As for r/conspiracy, I haven't seen any direct evidence to indicate this is the case, at least not in terms moderation. Though certainly, there are active campaigns to disrupt and derail the some of the content in the sub, if not most of it. I've noticed posts containing certain keywords or phrases are downvoted almost instantaneously, and tend to attract skeptics or worse, while others.. not so much. Though I have noticed most posts will be downvoted in r/conspiracy before others crossposted into the other subs regardless, pretty much every time I post there without failure. Nonetheless, there are some topics that tend to receive 'special attention' from certain overzealous individuals and special interest groups, and likely even government contractors on occasion.

I dunno about that. How do the bots discern which posts to up/downvote? Its certainly not every post. Looking at new and rising, the numbers are all over the place.

I speculate that there are words or phrases that trigger it. Apparently that was going on at /r/technology. All posts with the word 'tesla' were tagged and removed. It's also very possible that trolls -- they do exist in abundance -- sit around browsing /r/conspiracy and pick out which threads to target. It may be that a large percentage of users here post curated content that appears /r/conspiracy related but is ultimately benign and uninteresting or downright misleading and nefarious in its implications. 'Trojan horses', if you will. Such content may escape the down-voting bot-brigade -- Oh, MH307 investigation still going nowhere? How interesting. Jews planning a genocidal takeover of white America? Oh no.

Meta-thread discussing weird down-voting patterns? Insta-down-votes... Then a few up-votes pop up, proportional down-votes... Then it hits a popularity threshold, suddenly everyone wants to talk about it and my post has 20 up-votes.

How very, very interesting.

That is possible, I suppose. I did notice a lot of people started to use Telsa in their titles instead. As for the metas, I'll admit I myself have downvoted a few because we see these downvote complaint threads multiple times a day. Instead, maybe we should sticky one.

In a sane world it would be reasonable to accuse me of jumping to conclusions, but given all the drama, I say we should keep an open mind. A sticky thread is a good idea.

When I get bored I just upvote everything in new and controversial.

Just don't see it as a vote count, read it in as a shill counter.

Just learn to live with it, It is not going to go away, don't stop the dialog.

Defeatist opinion, downvoted.

It is all thought, I am ahead.

Imagine if you had to post a comment in order to upvote or downvote..

What an interesting idea

If we did that, we would (likely) be swarmed with comments worse than YouTube or Facebook. Any good content would (likely) be buried in a pile of horse shit.

Granted, your idea was spawned from good intentions, I just don't see it as being practical or producing a favorable outcome in any real-world applications.

[deleted]

You're kidding, right?

I'm actually a mod here. I post here all the time, and upvote stuff in the new & controversial section regularly.

Also: Shill accusations are a violation of Rule 10, so I'm going to have to remove your post.

So you won't suspect I'm removing the comment out of censorship, I'm going to reiterate that the user above just accused me of being a "shill", in spite of my extensive post history here, and the fact I often debate others outside the sub who attack the sub in defense of the it..

Damn. I've wished this for years.

Tell the mods, that sounds great!

The problem then is that we'd have hundreds of 'this' or '.' posts that clutter everything up. I'd say remove downvotes altogether for this sub but 1) it's very easy to get around and 2) there are a lot of shitty comments/posts.

I upvoted this.

I upvoted this!

/r/conspiratard never post here, they just comment. They can't handle being mass downvoted (how ironic) so upvoting the posts is a good tip. Still, keep an eye out for disinformation.

It doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. If you are new here just understand there is a group of people completely OBSESSED with this sub. Literally stalking ever single post, faking posts, opinions. Obsessed. They congregate on /r/conspiratard. It's their lives. They are racist and full of hate. It's not a conspiracy because it can't be. The group makes up the majority of subscribers here. They can't hide their organized behaviour (brigading, fake posts, racist troll posts) because it's such a massive effort. The only way to understand it is to acknowledge it as an obsession. Their behaviour is compulsive. Skeptards. It's a sort of Napoleon Complex for the intellectually deficient.

Just upvote it? That is rather counter productive. First of all, I don't up or down vote because there will be a collection of that data and I don't want it ever used against me in some nefarious manner. 2ND, what if the post is complete bullshit? Just upvote it? That helps credibility grow.. Amirite?