I mean, it could be the same people. Post a thread with Pizzagate info, upvote it to the top, post comments discrediting what is posted and upvote those comments to make it look like the Pizzagate info is manufactured and nonsense, as well as pushing the narrative that this sub is crazy. It's all a ploy to hurt credibility.

This is why theres a bunch of posts about browsing the new tab, the narrative is so obfuscated that it makes it easier to wade through the shit.

Having just come from one of these threads, it also helps if the OP is a video

People are lazy so they'll read the comments before watching the video

We have a concerted effort this weekend that is manufacturing the "this sub is crazy" vibe.

Have you noticed the increase in absolutely ridiculous nonsense recently? Like, yesterday there was a post about how some streets in NK kinda look like Donald Duck, which was a metaphor for Donald Trump (clearly) that marked where we were gonna nuke North Korea, and somehow the Illuminati were behind it.

It got downvoted, but it was so weird to even see, and the YouTube comments were really positive to the content. It's happening more and more often, and I can't tell if it's because we naturally attract crazies or it's an effort to make us all look like crazies.

I didn't see that particular post, but yeah we have some major bullshit on this sub right now. I wonder why?

Someone downvoted you to let you know that you are not allowed to wonder that.

Shit, I better check myself then, god forbid I thunk the wrong thinks. This whole sub is so fucky right now. This is not CTR flavor. I don't know what this is.

The thought police feel mildly gratified by your attempt to curb your brain function and thank you accordingly.

Yea, it's a mess but hey, in the end, who looks crazier than the "conspiracy theorist" that shits themselves over a conspiracy they don't believe in? They rat themselves out continually.

Excellent point. I very rarely interact with subjects I'm not interested in. Notable exception being flat earth. But I see that as a frontal assault on our credibility.

Definitely

I actually saw people talking about doing this shit here. I think I might've seen it in politics but I can't remember now, just that they were talking about this sub. Around September of last year I started getting into the habit of taking screenshots of the ignorant bs I ran across.

https://i.imgur.com/0QY8et5.png

IMO, those kinds of threads are designed to manipulate or influence your opinions on the content of the thread.

For example, if the thread wasn't upvoted, then the top comment with the contradicting opinion would rarely be seen by anyone.

Just another way reddit is gamed.

Why not donwvote to oblivion then, so that topic doesn't come up at all and people stay ignorant? That's the tactic the MSM employed with pizzagate until it reached critical mass and they had to address it. When they did, they did it in one huge blow over multiple different channels with the type of aggression we see in the comments on the PG threads. I would argue that caused more people to become suspicous, a la Streisand Effect.

FWIW the highly upvoted pizza thread yesterday was referencing a comment I made in another thread tying the sudden proliferation od the term "fake news" with Pizzagate. I guess u/Orangutan wanted to post that and a few other PG-related threads. I had no idea that was even posted until I browsed conspiracy and by then it was highly upvoted yet overrun with detractors (cough shills) by that time. Unless Orangutan is part of the reddit manipulation machine, this was just another PG thread attacked by shills. That was par for the course in r/pizzagate's heyday.

All I saw for months at a time were pizza gate threads and cries of being downvoted and buried. Well, I saw plenty of it and wasn't even looking. I also failed to see any concrete connections that would warrant an investigation. I say this, and at the same time I believe most of it is true. Updoots don't make arrests.

idk i think it speaks to the back and forth nature of conspiracy. Some want to believe in every far out idea, some only believe in the broader, generally accepted conspiracies, and some only believe in very few.

If that was really the case wouldn't they simply stick to the topics that are of interest to them and just disregard and not waste any time on any of the ones that they happen to think are absurd or paranoid delusions or simply some mad ramblings and much ado about nothing rather than jumping into the fray merely to state that's how they happen to feel about them?

Isn't that the classic definition of a shill? Someone who not only doesn't have anything of substance to add to the conversation but doesn't think that the conversation should even be taking place at all and is essentially trying to keep one from developing and taking place?

shill

Or I'm interested in the topic, but the OP does nothing to contribute to the field of knowledge or convince me of anything new. Or it flies in the face of rational and critical thought for the sake of presenting something novel. So I downvote threads that seem stupid to me, because I want to see less of them, and more well researched topics that interest me. I am tired of seeing this attitude that if you are disagreed with the opposing opinion is a shill and you are more right the less popular your opinion is.

Just because it's something that you've encountered before and feel let down by some kind of a revived re-hash of it that doesn't offer you anything new or substantial doesn't mean that everyone else is in the same boat and if you're not prepared to help get them up to speed you might at least leave them alone to do that for themselves.

So you can get as tired of it a you like but the sense of community and freedom of thought and expression that exists here will take you to task for it more often than not because it's more important to preserve that than anyone's personal dislikes about some other member or what topics they happen to find interesting enough to put up on that topics list.

Don't get me wrong, I upvote a lot of things here, I'm into reading about a lot of super fringe stuff even if it's not a pro level post. I want attention on alternative history, UFO, black budget programs, sci-fi shit, because I want more eyes on it.

I've been reading this stuff for 15 or more years now, even as my peers made fun of me about my beliefs. Most of them have shed their public school and liberal college ideologies and have been exposed to more. I experienced backlash over my beliefs that there was something fishy about 9/11 early on. I'm from NY so everyone knows someone who was there. It's still an open wound to some, because the theories are infuriating.

Anyway, what gets irritating is the meta reddit conspiracy stuff, and the fact that a lot of stuff gets upvoted to the top all while crying censorship. It makes no sense. Also, most of us know to browse "new". I'm not oppose to the idea that this site is engineered to push an agenda, like everything else. Yet, I feel genuinely grateful for my sense of free speech and ability to look into these things. Hell, I'm definitely on the list somewhere just due the number of hours I spend digging around.

wouldn't they simply stick to the topics that are of interest to them

I'm wishy washy on some of our conspiracies but that doesn't mean I'm going to not post in the thread. I think your expectation that someone only views and posts in threads they agree with didn't match reality.

"Interest" doesn't necessarily mean you have to agree with any particular point of view the topic is delivered with but rather have some salient thoughts of your own to add and contribute to further develop or flesh out those topics. If you don't why bother?

There are lots of topics I'm simply not interested in reading about or adding anything to when I peruse the lists but I see no purpose in trying to discourage anyone that does from doing it nor do I draw any particular conclusions about how intelligent they might or might not be based on some vain or puffed-up notion of how smart I am or what strictly interests me by comparison.

If there's actually anything to any of those particular conspiracies they'll grow of their own accord and if not they'll wither away soon enough from the lack of interest in them without any additional help or hindrance from me.

Then I'm confused what we're arguing about. Isn't it OP's contention that its out of place that there's a top rated comment? And its mine that it doesn't seem out of place someone might have interest and input in the particular conspiracy, even if it's to that particular conspiracy's detriment.

So this is an other-dimensional candyland maneuver? Where a a group with an agenda to discredit an idea is responsible for pushing the headline they disagree with to the top of the page, instead of killing it with downvotes? They could just start a thread themselves to make their point so their own manipulated top comment is also on top of their own headline.

In short, I think your idea is dumb.

The point is not to suppress the information, it's to extinguish without a doubt any validity of the thread. Closure is the point.

"This is the fact about this and don't ever question it again cause you're stupid if you do so"

Much more effective.

it's called "bad jacketing"......

It's an effective psychological technique. "Want to learn more about x? Well its wrong, and you're wrong for being interested about it."

Yup. They want us to see their pitiful refutations.

I stopped reading their refutations a while back, better for the sanity

Rare are great discussions and exchanges on reddit these days

Yup. That and blaming the jews for everything.

It's an effective psychological technique. "Want to learn more about x? Well its wrong, and you're wrong for being interested in it."

Yup. They want us to see their pitiful refutations.

Yup. That and blaming the jews for everything.

Yup. And this is the third reply to start with the word "Yup".

x

y

z

/ Aye, mateys... Thar be SHILLS in them thar hills!

The Hills Have Eyes!

Reddits point system is the ultimate form of generic validation for pretend feelings .Get rid of the point system and the shills will leave and organic thought will return . Reddit sold out and the days of true organic thought have taken a back seat to the popular vote often seen in settings such as high school and Facebook rumor mongering. Any posts or links with more than 300 up votes on this particular sub are pure bullshit, paid for advertising to direct the highest bidders narrative, don't be fooled by the advert bot disguised as an organic users free thought . Reddit is a commercial , Reddit is a corporation and last time I checked corporations are out to make money. As far as "the highly upvoted threads where the highest upvoted post is disagreeing with the threads premise " is because the organic users are chiming in against the manipulated points of the thread. Fake shill accounts vs real user accounts

I wish that were true, but the GLP Board (Godlike Productions) doesn't use a point system and currently has been infested with the ShariaBlue Termites.

These people do nothing but ruin every thread by brigade posting off-topic and shit posts.

While Trinity/Jason could block them by IP, he's shown how much of a sell out he really is by not doing so.

Hes decided that pushing the ShariaBlue teams to pay a for access while redressing the board with a mass amount of spammy full page ads guaranteed to provide income with all the traffic from these teams.

Ultimately, it's painfully obvious that TPTB are destroying dissent and means of propagating information forcing you to use Facebook, Google, and Twitter feeds that are heavily censored and manipulated.

I wish that were true, but the GLP Board (Godlike Productions) doesn't use a point system and currently has been infested with the ShariaBlue Termites.

That site widely believed to be run by military intelligence.

How is that possible, ALL i heard from trump supporters the whole campaign is that "The military LOVES trump, they support him at a 99% rate" so why in the fuck would they infiltrate boards to bash him? Do you have any proof at all that they are running it?

How is that possible

Have you heard of Operation Earnest Voice?

so why in the fuck would they infiltrate boards to bash him?

Because the elected government has nothing to do with the deep state.

Do you have any proof at all that they are running it?

See if your computer picked up any viruses while you were there.

Same with 4chan

Pizzagate is bullshit

geto'tta heeeeere.

lol can't spell well? Pizzagate is most definitely a load of crap. Haven't seen any evidence other than "code words" made up by a board of literal pedophiles. Maybe there's a 4changate going on and they need someone to blame for their own actions to throw the authorities off of them.

Yuuuuupp, once again only stepping in to oppose the jokes. You're all the saaaaaaame, bruh.

It usually happens when the title is circlejerk material and the top comment is an obvious takedown of it.

I've noticed that if a post about for example 9/11 or Sandy Hook reaches the front page, it's done for. Overrun with a multitude of people who seem to actually believe the official government narrative and their ad hominem attacks get upvoted while actual discussion gets upvoted.

See i WISH this sub talked about that stuff. You know, actual conspiracy theories. Instead of "TRUMP MAGA RUSSIAS GREAT HERES AN ARTICLE WITH PUTIN QUOTES!"

Bots. Both Pro Trump Shills and Pro Hillary Shills involved.

What's wrong with people disagreeing?

Upvoting is the new downvoting. Instead of downvoting things they don't agree with, they upvote them. And then they upvote contradictory comments. The evolution of reddit propaganda.

There be shills in them thar hills.

The Hills Have Eyes!

And the shills have lies hehe

It's a shill tactic to try and manipulate the users

It's propaganda, you instill doubt into the mind of the layman and they either accept the new information as fact or more often than otherwise, they'll just disregard the topic completely as not worth fussing about due to the confusion that the topic brings.

If the OP is controversial (i.e. 60-80% upvoted) it's probably bots.

It's because there's a contingency of users on Reddit that upvote but never read comment threads. They have very different tastes compared to the people who like to complain. You can see this in meme subs that I'm pretty sure don't have "Soros shills".

Shills

Russian shills voting shit up nonstop

The tactic is, don't downvote the post itself so that the highly upvoted shill comments are highly visible. It seems like a new thing they're doing rather than trying to kill the topic because that shit was not working. I suspect this shit will not work either.

we're like a coal mine fire......pouring in water doesn't work!

Or an electrical fire? Throw on water and get fried. :D

we have found the heart of the hydra and they are in a panic. their denials give us new leads!

I can't speak on all of these however two threads on the front page at the moment that do conform to your premise are the Boston bombing & WTC 7 ones but I think that's deserved. The top comment disagrees (& in the Boston bombing case disproves) with the post by laying out logically reasoned arguments supported by evidence.

I think this is the right thing to do. If we willingly believe anything without critically evaluating it any & every conspiracy theory will be undermined. In these two threads cases the top comment may disagree but I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think the opposite actually & that there needs to be more of it lest conspiracies be further discredited.

I'm not sure the disconnect between the thread & the comments necessarily means different people upvoted them. For example I upvoted the Boston bombing & WTC 7 threads despite agreeing with & up voting the top comments that contradicted them because I thought they were discussions worth being seen. However I do think your on to something, I can't show evidence but anecdotaly speaking I've seen a massive right-wing shift in this sub & would like to see an investigation into whether it is being Astro-turfed by the alt-right or not.

I feel like thats a poor expectation. The point of the forum is conversation. Its no secret trump supporters and Russian tools post here a lot and and support each other's posts. Yet if a person disagrees and does so in a convincing way then it stands to reason that it would be a too comment as it provokes conversation that progresses the larger thought process.

I noted that sometimes posts that would normally be downvoted on here get really high upwotes on the top and I get confused thinking "this is not what we'd do here". Then I keep reading and the further down you get, the more it is back to how you would expect the votes to go. Meaning that the unusually high upvotes are only temporary and given enough time, the real votes emerge. Reason is that 'they' obviously haven't got the time and resources to keep their warped results up for long.

Well I'd say if a thread gets upvoted high but most comments say its bullshit then it would mean the thread was upvoted by bots or comfirmation biase.

People who comment actually care, thats why they comment. People who go read the comment section care more then people who upvote/downvote the title. You see it alot in TIL that something gets upvoted to the top but the first comment completely disproves it. How OP is a bullshitter. It shouldnt have reached it to the top if you read the comments yet somehow it keeps rising. Most people just read the title and thats it. It confirms what they believe and it gets an upvote without thinking or reading about it. Or they just believe the title without any questions... some people are like that.

That's happened to my last 3 or so posts.

I post at night, wake up in the morning and the #1 post is some pro trump or pro russia bs that is distracting from the topic, personally attacking and gets 20 upvotes out of nowhere with no discussion

so yeah, anything not in line with an agenda gets auto downvoted, it's very discouraging, and it may be what makes reddit ultimately, at the end of the day, just another censored corporate news source.

and it's more deceptive. like when they suddenly overnight changed the voting algorithm and suddenly the most popular topics on the front page x 10 were judges not enforcing laws against the homeless in san francisco and something questioning the practice of circumcision.

which i thought was, wow, look at that, people care about the homeless and babies, actually. But that was all taken down rapidly and it was rejiggered to get everything back on track the way it is today.

i swear reddit has people who are tasked with preventing subversive ideas from becoming popular

however there is the caveat that if what you are saying aligns with one or another brigade, ie anything to the effect of 'lift sanctions, let russia do what they want, they should be able to invade crimea, israel should be able to annex what it wants because the palestinians are barbaric, hillary clinton is a criminal, donald trump is cleaning the swamp'

well you get the idea, there are a number of them in effect quite possibly paying for some or another special access or privileges using the backend api of reddit itself.

the more they lie and the more they censor the more they reveal what they really fear, so when their intent is so obviously derived, it is no wonder that it confirms our expectations of a corporate outlet ie conde fucking naste (whoever the fuck those people are)

FWIW, a similar effect was very prominent in /politics during primaries.

Links to articles positive about Bernie Sanders would be upvoted to the top all the time, but most of the comments, especially highly upvoted ones, were condescending remarks or outright name calling of Sanders and his supporters.

We all know who is responsible for that.

My explanation was that shills back then did not have enough accounts to counteract a general positive attitude towards Sanders from the majority of reddit users, but they could flood the comment sections with their spam easily, since unlike regular users, shills could post a lot more comments.

And on reddit, if you get your comments into a submission early, it is much easier to get them upvoted as the top comments and keep them that way, especially if you "forum slide" the comments section so that regular users have to scroll down a lot before they reach a comment that argues the opposite point of view than shills.

When Sanders lost the nomination (or to be more precise, when the steal of the nomination had been completed), what was upvoted in /politics and what the comment sections looked like became more consistent. I don't know if it was a result of shills getting more accounts to rig the upvoting game, or a lot less people were interested in talking about Clinton and corruption surrounding her than there were people interested in talking about Sanders and his policies. Probably a combination of both.

Note that the dynamics of this may change once the thread reaches /all.

But I would like to reiterate that if it is shills that are doing something like you describe, assuming they don't have an overwhelming manpower and number of accounts to dedicate to this, they have to monitor /new queue so that they can get their comment in early. So my question to you, in addition to seeing top comments in highly upvoted threads disagreeing with the article, do you also see an even higher number of negative comments in articles in /new queue?

If percentage of negative comments in /new queue is significantly higher than in articles that reach the front page of the sub, that would be a good indication of astroturfng operation in action.

It's a psyop. You say "X is true" and then you say "X is false" and people get confused, stressed and lose interest.

It's meant to obfuscate every issue so that no consensus can be reached and to paralyze public opinion by confusing it with conflicting information and opinion. Basically, modern propaganda. Keep in mind that the National Defense Authroization Act made it (now) legal for the government to propagandize the American public.

Watch Adam Curtis' documentary HyperNormalization for some background.

"we will have succeeded when the public believes nothing"

Yuuuuupp, once again only stepping in to oppose the jokes. You're all the saaaaaaame, bruh.

Why not donwvote to oblivion then, so that topic doesn't come up at all and people stay ignorant? That's the tactic the MSM employed with pizzagate until it reached critical mass and they had to address it. When they did, they did it in one huge blow over multiple different channels with the type of aggression we see in the comments on the PG threads. I would argue that caused more people to become suspicous, a la Streisand Effect.

FWIW the highly upvoted pizza thread yesterday was referencing a comment I made in another thread tying the sudden proliferation od the term "fake news" with Pizzagate. I guess u/Orangutan wanted to post that and a few other PG-related threads. I had no idea that was even posted until I browsed conspiracy and by then it was highly upvoted yet overrun with detractors (cough shills) by that time. Unless Orangutan is part of the reddit manipulation machine, this was just another PG thread attacked by shills. That was par for the course in r/pizzagate's heyday.

idk i think it speaks to the back and forth nature of conspiracy. Some want to believe in every far out idea, some only believe in the broader, generally accepted conspiracies, and some only believe in very few.

So this is an other-dimensional candyland maneuver? Where a a group with an agenda to discredit an idea is responsible for pushing the headline they disagree with to the top of the page, instead of killing it with downvotes? They could just start a thread themselves to make their point so their own manipulated top comment is also on top of their own headline.

In short, I think your idea is dumb.

Just because it's something that you've encountered before and feel let down by some kind of a revived re-hash of it that doesn't offer you anything new or substantial doesn't mean that everyone else is in the same boat and if you're not prepared to help get them up to speed you might at least leave them alone to do that for themselves.

So you can get as tired of it a you like but the sense of community and freedom of thought and expression that exists here will take you to task for it more often than not because it's more important to preserve that than anyone's personal dislikes about some other member or what topics they happen to find interesting enough to put up on that topics list.