I have observed this for at least the last 2 years. I also suspect there's a 'capping algorithm' that instead of conspicuously downvoting posts into oblivion, it instead only downvotes enough times to prevent the post from rising too quickly to keep it off the 'hot' page. This provides plausible deniability ('some people just didn't like it') instead of leaving behind the fingerprint of a large block of downvotes occurring all at once.

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It's only worth going to Voat once they actually have people there for us to influence. At the moment Reddit is the 32nd most popular website in the world, whereas Voat is the 11,327th most popular.

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It's most most important for us to stay near the masses, so you would first need to move the herd of sheep before it's worth us following

Moving the sheep to cause a bandwagon effect...you do appreciate you're suggesting not trying to actually cause critical thinking to grow but merely finding a way to push your own agenda on sheeple? This is dishonest and counterproductive no matter how truthful of a thing you're trying to "herd". Why is there so much done to debunk lies and so little effort spent at figuring out and applying means to turn more people into critical thinkers and remove the root of the problem?

You can't teach all the sheep to think critically, the best hope with most is to expose them to the words of the critical thinkers on /conspiracy and debunk the misinformation they have been fed by the mainstream media, that won't teach them to think but it will at least give them the chance to realize they have been lied to

Yeah...I try to start with low level stuff first though..local officials caught taking bribes, that kind of stuff. The worst of it borders on comic book supervilanry and is too hamfisted to just say without building a case that we don't live in even a remotely upstanding world.

Isn't that like the chicken or the egg conundrum?

Do you realize how culty that sounds?

this.

".. for us to influence.." is it really about influencing? The people with the means to do something already know, they are just unwilling to act for fear of life. So are we really here to influence? Influence means you have an agenda that you wish to push, right or wrong. So I wouldn't say influence, because we aren't trying to make people see it our way. We aren't trying to make anyone do anything. Merely sharing useful information so as to be aware and make conscious decisions. I will never try to convince other with influence, just be assertive when I tell them what I think and why I think it. Influencing leads to looking like the paid opposition loons who make people who question things look idiotic.

Thats right, youre that paid shill

it is true but sitting around here pissing in to the wind isnt going to change anything

We're not though, while we're being censored to an extent, we still get plenty of randoms viewing out information. Going to Voat would censor us almost completely

We can do both.

You gotta wonder why everyone hates voat so much. It began thanks to this type of censorship.

It's not about hating, there's a clear effort from TPTB to relocate us away from here, they don't like our stuff spilling over into other channels and influencing the sheep. We need to look for all the popular places and go to them, it's not in our interest to go somewhere by ourselves, if Voat ever becomes popular it will be manipulated just like Reddit is.

i'm not certain, but i believe that reddit has a buffer based on your ip address, not your username choice, meaning that if you try to sock-up your post, reddit nullifies it. correct me if i'm wrong, of course.

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I think you would have to test it from another ip to be sure, such as a tor browser or VPN. If they are using IP tracking to combat sock puppets, which I'd have to assume they are, it's very possible they are reporting the votes as you think they should, to make it harder for you to catch on that they're nullifying votes.

Sock puppets?

https://np.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/3sul2l/there_is_some_obvious_gang_down_voting_going_on/cx0l1pz

I talked about it here, it's so suspicious because I posted links one is np reddit and another one is archive. is . People on the original thread from TIL were complaining about an outright fake quote from De Gaulle and the submitter was supposedly karmawhoring at the time of the Paris attacks or just plainly pushing an agenda that French and Americans must stick to each other right or wrong no matter what.

https://np.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/3stggw/propaganda_in_til_sarc_til_during_a_nuclear_scare/

https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3ss34g/til_during_a_nuclear_scare_in_1960_the_president

So I resubmitted my mockery of the fake and manipulative TIL post and then replaced a few words with what I thought would be said by the US State Department in what I think is their shameless tactic of capitalizing on a advantageous tragedy to further their own interests and agenda.

Same results almost 14 total votes all in all fluctuating between 2, 0 ,1 net votes during the first few hours.

This is only my speculation as I have no proof whatsover but it could be possible that this account of mine might have been tagged or the new part of /r/conspiracy is constantly being monitored.

My advice is that if you want to keep your sanity or peace of mind then it might be best if you forget about it and hope for the best, pray that your greatest fears/suspicions won't eventually come to pass.

Look at some cute kitty videos, read on the latest iphone features, etc. Stay away from the news, it's quite depressing. Hope seems all but lost. What was that St Paul said about the greatest power of man?, Faith, Love, and Hope. Seems more and more of a fantasy each passing day.

OP is stupid, Reddit limits your upvotes per IP thats why you cant post something more than once per 9 minutes. I implore everyone else who still has some common sense to join me and down vote all this guys posts

A better idea, we should stalk him for months voting his posts down to exactly zero votes to increase his paranoia!

I'm just kidding, please be nice to our internet neighbors. And use a different account name if you are going to say mean things.

what does the username change have to do with it?

You are using a user name that supports Bernie Sanders, but are saying mean things. It would be preferable if you didn't use someone's name who actively advocates against spreading hate and making personal attacks when you are being hateful and making personal attacks. That is all. It is mostly inconsequential but I felt like making the suggestion anyways.

Its very possible Reddit has a system in place that looks at IP addresses for vote manipulation. This idea does not dismiss the bot idea. What we do know is that Mods kill posts.

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Yeah even if you were to prove that its happening, Reddit would not do anything about it. They know posts get manipulated.

But what does that have to do with crows?

From my first day after joining Reddit I've been completely baffled by the inexplicable downvote that seems to spawn on my most ordinary and non controversial posts or comments. It's never made a bit of sense. I posted a question once that was loosely worded "if you have information about criminal activities, but fear for your safety or the information relates to state authorities, what is the best way to make that information public without outing yourself?". I just couldn't figure out who would come along and keep downvoting a question like that but sure enough, it would climb to 2 up and a few minutes later be right back at 0. Climb to 4, fall to 0 again. I don't buy that there are just that many trolls browsing at just the right places and times and all setting sights on such ordinary shit like that.

Got screen grabs?

I spent the entire month of November 2014, right after Election Day, grabbing screenshots, with timestamps going minute by minute, and proving, without a doubt, that there is vote manipulation of topics, based on keywords and other criteria, likely using an algorithm. I made a series of posts on this sub clearly proving and demonstrating how reddit manipulates the voting on topics. I had RES, reddit Votify and one other reddit voting extension, the name of which escapes me at the moment, installed to track the vote counts in the screenshots. The OP describes a common method of 'downvote cancellation' of certain topics that essentially keep a topics score at or near zero, making it appear there is little or no interest in certain subjects. Thus making sure certain subjects never get to the "hot" queue, the default queue for the sub.

As a result of the vote manipulation and a couple other reassons I actually wiped out my posting history and stopped posting here a couple months later and went to Voat.

The OP is correct, vote manipulation of the topics on reddit and in this sub is very real.

Good for you. You went a lot further than I did, but I came to the same conclusion. Now I go to Voat, Hubski and, occasionally, Digg to help them grow. I just visit here out of habit, really. There is very little posted on Reddit that hasn't been tainted by manipulation. I'll be glad to see the other sites do well and I hope they hang in there long enough to capture an audience to sustain them.

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IIRC controversial tab just has the posts that have a close to equal amount of upvotes and downvotes.

Not that I'm completely doubting your claims but when you load a page it's not guaranteed which server you're on especially controversial posts, each time you refresh you'll get different numbers.

Plus why are you having sock puppet accounts to upvote your own comments? That's just as bad as what you're complaining about.

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No, I use the socks to post in other subs. I use this acct for this sub. I just used the socks as an upvote test, and I agree it is shady but it didn't really make a difference since it was a zeroed-out thread anyway. Either way, sock-puppets AND (apparantly) bots are used VERY OFTEN on reddit. NO DOUBT ABOUT IT. And if I have a sock don't you think Hillary's Super-PAC has about a thousand of them? Just trying to get people's eyes open to the subterfuge that is going down...

Can confirm I have tried a similar test. Not with zero votes, but with negative votes. I sat for an hour creating socks and upvoting one particular post, and it still hit minus fourteen. I took the results to admin...

...And they accused me of brigading my own posts. It was Occaram (or whatever his name is), who offered to look into it, and him who made the accusation that I was brigading my own post. I wrote back and asked him why the post would have a minus fourteen score if I was brigading it with upvotes, if it wasn't being simultaneously brigaded down at the same time. He never wrote back after that.

Not that I'm completely doubting your claims

I'm not disagreeing with you. Just providing some more information.

The most important point is not to move to Voat, we need to stay where the masses our, we need to influence them, Voat would just be an echo chamber.

By default, reddit will negate multiple votes coming from the same IP address.

BTW, congratulations on admitting to violating reddit's TOS by using multiple accounts to upvote yourself.

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It does literally what you described in your post.

If you keep doing that sort of shit you're going to end up shadowbanned so you might want to quit while you're ahead.

When you capitalize whole sentences and say dumb shit like "reddit is deddit!!" You take so much steam out of your argument. You say something interesting and valid but then you look so gooberish that it makes people question your statement purely on being too goofy. Save goofiness for in person, it doesn't translate well via text.

Yes. This is why they stopped showing total upvotes and downvotes about a two years ago because it was easy to see it happening.

There was no other reason to stop showing total upvotes and downvotes.

They also slipped ina default setting that you wouldnt see comments below a certain vote number and most people never change that in preferences so many interesting downvoted comme ts are hidden from most redditors..

You are correct.

The real problem with voat though is they are STARTING with moderaters/censors.

Moderaters/censors are what destroyed reddit. So voat is just more of the same.

Make sure you make your home page be one filled with all the uncensorship subreddits and default to "new" sorting so you see the posts as they are posted before voting or censorship by mods.

Like this.

https://www.reddit.com/r/news+worldnews+technology+science+uncensored+bitcoin+space+conservative+liberal+conspiracy+progressive+futurology+investing+bitcoin+spacex+politic+moderationlog+politics+undelete+tech+truereddit+occupywallstreet+realtech+longtail+uncensorship+europe+gadgets+php+python+drones+rasberrypi+arduino+electronics_robots+robots+virtualreality%20+european+removalbot+europemeta+europecensorship+euromigration/new/

While not required, you are requested to use the NP domain of reddit when crossposting. This helps to protect both your account, and the accounts of other users, from administrative shadowbans. The NP domain can be accessed by prefacing your reddit link with np.reddit.com.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

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OP you are one hundred percent right. Zero bots are being used, and if the threads they are being used on is anything to go by, it is specifically Hasbara who are using them.

Great fucking post.

Having used this exact criteria for banning other users in the past, the fact this behavior still exists can only mean that that it's officially permitted. Endorsed even?

I started suspecting this when I posted up a pretty good piece of evidence that showed that it is likely that there will be a push for nato and the UN to take action on syria rather than the usa like recent wars. You would think something like that would at least not be negative but it got 5 up 5 down I believe.

The final test is using different IPs on 3 different accounts. Easiest way would be to have a trusted friend(s) test with you. There is a chance automod can detect ips, though not 100% sure

You should use Tor browser with sockpuppets.

Here is a topic currently being manipulated--

https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/3vn7nf/the_narrative_is_falling_apart/

Does voat even have a decent size user base?

Voat is the 11,327th most popular website in the world, Reddit is the 32nd. Us leaving here would only benefit those who try to keep our information away from the uninformed on other parts of Reddit.

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But its NOT like old reddit.

It has moderators. Old reddit had no moderators. User votes did all the selection.

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Aren't votes fuzzed?

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Why not both?

Voat is better.

but unfortunately completely useless for spreading the truth, as the user-base is far too small compered to Reddit

I definitely get the sense there is bot manipulation of votes. Technically, I don't see that this would be very difficult. Reddit is open source, and given the resources available to a certain alphabet agency, you'd only need a small team to develop the kind of tools that would allow you to filter for key words in a post, or sources in a post, and upvote or downvote accordingly. I think doing it based on a user account would be simple too. I would not be surprised if these kinds of tools eventually make their way into corporate hands, if they aren't already.

Because of the unmistakable bot and shill factor, tools like reddective and the Reddit Enhancement Suite are indispensable. Since I've started using these tools, it's become easier to see what's going on when massive events like the Paris attacks and mass shootings take place. It's made for a better experience here. I know the users more than I could without them.

What was the post, what sub was it in and what thread was it in? Context matters, you may have just been saying the wrong thing in the wrong place. Also why would admit to using sock puppets? Its pretty much not allowed on any sub unless you actually lost access to your other account.

You take reddit way to seriously

Well done fellow. The comment that I posted re:feminism got zeroed out too (maybe not in the way you mentioned), which actually made me laugh considering that I posted :"An erect hard cock is the answer to all of feminists problems."

https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/3up839/feminist_war_toronto_dad_may_do_6_months_in/cxh2kkh

Can you imagine someone reading that in a classroom? LOL

Take care fella.

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.... Huh!!!!!??????

Yea it isn't exactly hidden? They use it to keep posts around the same amount, that way there isn't a massive separation of upvotes between posts. Not really a big deal at all. This sub is retarded

Yet this post has loads...

Yeah even if you were to prove that its happening, Reddit would not do anything about it. They know posts get manipulated.

Not that I'm completely doubting your claims

I'm not disagreeing with you. Just providing some more information.

But what does that have to do with crows?

No, I use the socks to post in other subs. I use this acct for this sub. I just used the socks as an upvote test, and I agree it is shady but it didn't really make a difference since it was a zeroed-out thread anyway. Either way, sock-puppets AND (apparantly) bots are used VERY OFTEN on reddit. NO DOUBT ABOUT IT. And if I have a sock don't you think Hillary's Super-PAC has about a thousand of them? Just trying to get people's eyes open to the subterfuge that is going down...

Can confirm I have tried a similar test. Not with zero votes, but with negative votes. I sat for an hour creating socks and upvoting one particular post, and it still hit minus fourteen. I took the results to admin...

...And they accused me of brigading my own posts. It was Occaram (or whatever his name is), who offered to look into it, and him who made the accusation that I was brigading my own post. I wrote back and asked him why the post would have a minus fourteen score if I was brigading it with upvotes, if it wasn't being simultaneously brigaded down at the same time. He never wrote back after that.

.... Huh!!!!!??????

It does literally what you described in your post.

If you keep doing that sort of shit you're going to end up shadowbanned so you might want to quit while you're ahead.

I think you would have to test it from another ip to be sure, such as a tor browser or VPN. If they are using IP tracking to combat sock puppets, which I'd have to assume they are, it's very possible they are reporting the votes as you think they should, to make it harder for you to catch on that they're nullifying votes.

It's not about hating, there's a clear effort from TPTB to relocate us away from here, they don't like our stuff spilling over into other channels and influencing the sheep. We need to look for all the popular places and go to them, it's not in our interest to go somewhere by ourselves, if Voat ever becomes popular it will be manipulated just like Reddit is.