Upvoted. ;/

It's true, every new post will be downvoted within the first 5 minutes of posting regardless of quality or subject. This has been the case for at least a couple of years.

On the other hand, this sub has become so overwhelmed with shitposts, memes, junkspam, politics, video garbage, and all kinds of other debris that quite a few real members watch the new queue trying to stop the rubbish in its tracks and promote more meaningful conversations.

Hence my reply to your post -

Because most things on this sub are garbage.

Yeah this is pretty much it

10 word titles with no SS, link, or any info at all get downvoted by me. When asked about it OP's usually say "I saw it on 4chan"... Very downvote worthy in my opinion.

Just chiming in to say this is correct.

Could be shills.

Or it could be the infestation of partisan politics posters and people who dont believe in conspiracies and just come here for laughs.

The old group of mods got banned trying to prevent that, it really sucks to because Ive yet to find another conspiracy discussion forum as good as this one

could be shills? as far as I'm concerned every post and comment is from a shill in this dumpster fire. except me. I'm definitely not a shill. I'm totally one of you guys

I posted something about a false alarm at a NC nuclear plant and it was immediately down voted. I assumed bots, but I suppose humans would also be effective.

I believe in "some" conspiracys, do you have to agree with everything in this sub to participate?

statements like the one you are replying to are just part of the furniture in here. its basically spam

every thread has a 'the shills are out in force' post that could literally be posted by automodbot in every post submitted. so yes, anything less than full support of anything said on this sub will be attacked as shillery

basically every important thread does have shills and it has become so painfully obvious

yeah man they should just have automod post 'shills incoming' to every post. just part of the scenery, like the bot that asks people to use no participation links

do you deny the use of shills by governments, corporations, billionaires?

And most importantly PR media relations firms and PACS.

no.

i think generic shill whining of the sort that could be posted in literally every post submitted to this godforsaken website (even across all subreddits) is essentially spam because its useless and could easily be done by a robot.

While I agree with the other reply to this, I’m not sure if the question was addressed. You absolutely don’t have to agree to participate. My take is its best to absorb what is offered, formulate your own opinion/perspective, and just be respectful when disagreeing in the comments if you feel it’s necessary to do so. Like the other guy said, be ready for downvotes when disagreeing on just about anything, but anyone who agrees with everything in this sub and takes it all as fact is foolish.

The old group of mods got banned trying to prevent that,

Nope. They were banned for use alt-accounts to push their talking points and attempting to take over the subreddit by removing the mods that didn't fit their agenda.

Post history checks out, 2 years of inactivity straight to slandering this sub and the people that try to use it to have honest discussions and debates.

Back to The_Donald?

This sub went to shit and everyone here knows it.
The only thing wrong in what he said is that he suggest they failed.

“This sub went to shit” No no. Reddit went to shit.

ding ding ding

Same reason /r/all is mostly /r/politics spam

Mostly? They have an iron grip on what or doesn't make it to /all.

Sort by controversial and you get a lot of fun stuff! Maybe food maybe bad but One man’s trash is another’s stranger!

Why do all you guys like looking at post histories so much? Is it that you can't refute what I said so you're just looking for a way to make people think what I said isn't true because of my post history?

Cause “debate the content not the source” only applies to posts I guess. Nothing you said was inaccurate.

Why are people not allowed to look at your comment history and think, "that is not normal"

Why can't someone look at your comment bitching about alt accounts pushing talking points and then say, "wow, that's rich coming from an account that is clearly an alt pushing talking points"?

Seems legit to me

No, actually your post history says way more than the comment. That's why people do it. Your account is GARBAGE.

Stay vigilant, people. They have ordered the sub to be assassinated. The massacre is happening. The conspiracy Holocaust is taking place.

finally, a reasonable take. everyone around here is hyperventilating

assassinated.... massacre... Holocaust

For goodness sake it's an internet forum, cool it with the victim rhetoric.

Come they have for this sub. The great Bot war begun it has.

for the amount of damage reddit could do, it really doesnt cost much money to keep it in check.

Especially since we cant see the (up,down) vote count anymore.

Also chiming in to say this is correct. My most recent post got downvoted immediately to zero, then I checked the /new/ feed and saw literally every post downvoted to zero.
BROWSE BY NEW, FELLOW COMMUNITY USERS!

Could be shills.

What’s that supposed to mean? People who are paid to downvote posts on some sub? Who would be paying? There are tons of posts here anyway, so what effect would that have?

Shills arent real dont be silly

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Internet_Defense_Force

I've definitely noticed the "immediate downvote" bots, or WeverTF is going on here.

It is a subtle yet powerful way of burying the organic posts here, because the first 10 votes applied to a post weigh more heavily (when it comes to climbing the ladder towards front page visibility) than the next 100, and those 100 weigh more heavily than the next 1000.

Getting downvoted excessively in the first hour can obliterate visibility, and it is easy to do if those immediate bot downvotes combine with outside brigade action.

I'm also speculating that when manipulative MSM material is planted here by the usual suspects and skyrockets unnaturally to the top of r/conspiracy, it was achieved initially by that post being "overlooked" by those immediate downvote bots to allow it some serious "ladder climbing" legs, its then followed up with a person/bot brigade.

I had a post the other day with 31 downvotes, which is the most I've seen in any of my posts. It was a relatively generic comment criticizing DNC corruption.

Ha. My most hated comment of all time (at something like -100) was, get this, me merely trying to clarify what another redditor's anti-DNC comment was. I wasn't even rendering an opinion, just explaining it to a third redditor who didn't really understand the initial comment.

And this was in r/technology of all places.

I've got a post somewhere with I think -400 on it for saying something along the lines of, "Anytime a thread is astroturfed like this to push an agenda, your downvotes are actually upvotes."

For whatever reason, they especially didn't like that being said.

Ha. I've said the same thing more or less, "r/politics: the sub where downvotes feel like upvotes!"

That is actually the more sane of the larger subs too.

Not on the topic of Russiagate. Ha ha.

Yes, there you're right. Was really sad during the email leaks. On just how uninformed the technology sub was regarding technology.

was it this one?

https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/8kpn9t/every_person_in_this_photo_supports_the_same/dz9kf6z/?context=3

Modern leftists are totalitarian control freaks. They won't be happy until they shred the Constitution piece by piece.

in response to this, also -30 something karma post

Ss: the only thing more annoying than evangelical christianity are the mackbooks at starbucks crowd. The people in this picture are the liberal equivalent to christian preachers on TV. Liberalism is a greater threat to the world than Israel or Russia.

doesnt seem outrageous that youd get downvoted for what looks like a piling in on a 'liberalism is a mential disorder' type of michael savage take

Post when the bots are asleep :)

Eh it just changes which bots are active. Look at this sub night and day difference. Night time in America all the pro-Trump stuff gets upvoted. Day time all the anit-Trump stuff gets upvoted. It matter not what time, some pollitical faction is influencing this subreddit.

Yeah, I know, bots are of course never “asleep”. Unfortunately the humourless logic bombs chose to downvote my brilliant joke instead.

Agreed, don't you guys realize we are being brigaded on a daiky basis? Its just TPTB trying to limit the flow of information. This subs controlled in one way or another. btw "escape the fate" is a pretty cool band.

Ironically, this is one of the escaped posts.

I think there may have been a little exaggeration by OP. But there are certainly some very volatile voting patterns in the sub in general. It's definitely a battleground, that much is clear. But I don't agree with a lot of people's opinions about who the actual combatants are day-to-day...

TMOR. Ban them from this sub and there's your solution.

That sub is less than a 6th of the size of this one, you really think they are the entirety of the problem

Yes because manipulative can be achieved with even smaller numbers than what they boast.

Alts.

I'm unsure whether you're trolling or actually that oblivious to their mission within this sub?

I'm trollig because I don't think tmor is responsible for 100% of the problem

Considering 1 user can be multiple accounts amongst multiple platforms then the numbers become moot. It's a gathering for them collect circle jerk material, go back to their sub, circle jerk and then finally brigade.

This.

i think we should ban anyone that disagrees with me

Found the genius from TMoR

i like that you think im smart

It's pretty simple to find out is it not? Can find out the context easily as well. If you're here for anything else but honest discourse then you shouldn't be here.

i agree. if your position cant be argued with rationally and logically you are here in bad faith

screaming out maga or fuck shills or yall are retarded isnt useful

TMoR should be banned from here.

They break the rules of this sub constantly and exist basically to act like morons here.

Since you're actually defending that behavior by saying they have a right to be here, you're a turd. <3

It's been happening before TMOR was a thing, so who is next on your list?

If you go to your user page, and hit refresh, you'll see that the vote count on posts to r/conspiracy swing by tens of percentage points over a matter of seconds, even on somewhat older posts. Same thing with r/politics. Not so much with other subs.

It's clearly bots.

vote counts often go up or down by 1 or 2 points when you refresh. i read that it is done intentionally in an attempt to keep people from knowing if their vote bots are working, or something like that

if you mean a swing of more than 5 points or so, then i dunno

You're describing vote fuzzing. That's completely normal.

Vote fuzzing does not vary it by 10%.

It can -- I have posts on subs where I'm considered more controversial where vote fuzzing would shift me from +3 to -2.

That's completely normal.

and completely useless

The reason they did in the past was so the bots themselves couldn't tell if their botting was fruitful.

Seems like a waste these days with all the manipulation all over.

Concealing bot voting is the goal. Makes it harder for bots to verify they haven't been shadowbanned.,

Usually only happens on political posts as well

I see it on just about all of my posts, not sure why you think that

Are they all political? /s

I've noticed this also. The votes are probably managed by bots from the organizations behind the accounts that seek this forum out just to call you names and waste your time & energy.

jesus christ you got downvoted . Well their not even trying to hide it are they now.

check my most recent post attempt, 0 score, 17% upvote, no stated reasons or objections to what i post besides obvious half-assed shilling.

i do believe what is on the front page here is following some agenda, like yesterdays anti-google post got way high up there and i got my highest rated comment of all time, but i wonder, whose work am i doing? where are those upvotes coming from? why does this get through but so much other good stuff doesn't?

it's like russians, shareblue and t_d are arguing over what goes on here, and for some reason as of now google is on the shitlist of all three, is how i interpret that.

my post, which is basically outlining exactly what these three forces are up to, get naturally 0 and some trolls.

its a decent post, though the borders you drew around the groups are probably too defined and lack the gray area. thats to be expected though, because this shit is hugely complicated. an example would be that while we know russia supports trump and wants to prop him up, their number one goal is division (a much more lasting legacy of their work), and so they promote the most militant of the left and the right

that said the most obvious russian bots you see online are dumb magaheads with 'flag, country, guns, god' in their profiles

fair enough

agreed the number one goal of the russians is division, they want to see america split up like the ussr was, and then they will finally be able to have an orgasm again without reservation, or something lol.

The gray area is a good point, there some forces just want chaos and the psychological data on users and so they are going to spam the full spectrum, see what shakes out. The hand will not know it's talking to the other hand sometimes even.

We individuals are truly in a maze, a foggy, mirrored labrynth of information where robots and governments are building the thing out before anyone else has a chance to.

humans are once again like those gaul/celt wooden statues. people inside a giant imaginary structure of a person.

i enjoy trying to parse out what accounts seem to be dishonest manipulators

i think it can be done with some sort of certainty by paying attention to how often they post, how consistent their views are, and finding inconsistencies with who they claim to be and what they push

for example, 'americans' who say things like putin is a saint? very weird

certain absolutist positions stand out, like there is no russian conspiracy with trump and he isn't in their pocket somewhat, israel does no wrong, 9/11 and pizzagate are non-issues, and Q worship come to mind as suspicious.

i saw what happens when you actually go into it with them, you get excluded quickly. they control so many accounts and you are just one person. it's like certain words are camped out and posting those tags sets certain things in motion....

im an absolutist on pizzagate lol

though i find it hard to imagine why youd have to pay someone to say 'pizzagate probably isnt real'

That post went down in flames because most of it was so off mark that even the shills couldn't use it for anything.

unhelpful, if you'd like to actually contribute, do please tell me where i'm so wrong.

i find it odd when people are sooooooo convinced it is wrong they have to downvote but don't have the guts to actually make a case for their point.

I don't really give a shit what you find odd. Your post was, IMO, a pile of crap filled with so many ridiculous misconceptions... I wouldn't bother to set fire to that thing, let alone waste my time detangling that mess.

Thanks for sharing though.

Try posting anything about Trump that isn't negative and see what happens in the first 10 minutes.

Trump has his own cult sub.

Why would you praise the president in r/conspiracy?? Did we praise Bush or Obama?

Are you asking rhetorically, or are you asking because you weren't here at all?

It was rhetorical

https://www.reddit.com/r/MarchAgainstTrump/comments/8inrke/difference/dyt8b4z/

Hi fellow conspiracy minded individuals... I too don't praise Obama.

Fucking lol, guy

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How much time have you spent here?

People unironically praise Obama frequently.

"anything about Trump that isn't negative" != praise

This is an excellent technique for manipulating information on a subreddit.

Same exact thing has been happening lately over at voat.

This happens with every voting system. We need a different system. Like sorted by number of views or something.

Perhaps certain up/down votes ought to be given greater weight.

Say, for example, a person whose comments have generated greater discussion over the past so many days.

Their votes could be given a weighting (2x, 3x, whatever).

This would not solve all problems, but it would be interesting to see what effect it might have.

Some voters are more equal than others?

I think we have this problem already

Surely active and consistent contributors should be valued more than a random user from r/all or one who never comments don't you think?

They should just ban everyone who comes in to say conspiracies aren't real. It's one thing to disagree. It's contrary to the sub and terrible for discussion when people hostile to the topic in general swing by.

Yeah, I mean, I would hope that there might be people open to be swayed but that’s probably not the reality of the situation. Seems so silly to go to a conspiracy sub specifically to go against any possibility of conspiracy. Such a waste of time, yet people do it. I mean, there is certainly nothing wrong with having and open mind and looking at possibilities. But if you don’t like conspiracy, just don’t search out the sub.

All systems based on natural human interaction with computers/the internet can be mimicked by computers, aka gamed and taken advantage of.

Number of views? Bots that auto-click links.
Comment activity, like another person suggested? Swarm of bots that all comment to each other in a real-ish looking pattern.
Weigh upvotes from upstanding members more heavily? Swarm of bots that all upvote each other

There is a way to circumvent all of it.

Wow you could really mess with someone's emotional state by using such manipulations

JTRIG, online manipulation. https://www.hooktube.com/watch?v=QxAd0n2c5M8

That's what I think of the government. Not that is should be like that, on the contrary, that IT IS like that.

https://cnntoken.io/

Captcha per interaction. 4chan style

over at yours.org if you want to vote or comment you pay in crypto. That's a pretty good foil to the manipulation. Not perfect but pretty good

How do you circumvent all of it?

And thank you

Howbout sort by value?

But then comes the question of what is value.

Reddit seemed to have good intentions at the beginning with a simple "up" or "down" upvote to coincide with if the comment was contributing to the discussion or not. Now, it's used as an emotional reaction.

And this algorithm only further proves manipulation. Also, isn't Reddit now "Owned" by advanced publications?

" It is named after the Staten Island Advance, the first newspaper owned by the Newhouse family, in which Sam Newhouse bought a controlling interest in 1922. "

There's rabbit holes all around us and many don't even realize.

https://cnntoken.io/

Yeah, if you add the shills guarding the place then only a few of them are truly required to keep control of the front page...

The same shit definitely goes down in r/the_donald

I think this particular scenario prevents threads on r-conspiracy from reaching frontpage of reddit (as a whole)

only my guess though.

Sure is, hmmm.

Has anyone checked if this happens in other subs?

Yeah
/r/politics /r/science and some others

So could the conclusion be that only about 10 percent of all posts made are worthy of getting upvotes? And the rest are just not well-liked by the people who vote on the /new tab?

So basically, the subs accused of brigading here also have similar, eerie voting patterns.

Yup, nothing to see here.

I'm full of theories but because they are all my own and there isn't anything to link to, I don't even bother posting here anymore. Every single post on my old account just got downvoted to fuck.

Kinda sad that we live in a time where if it isn't on the internet, it isn't real.

Would it help if they hid the numbers on this sub reddit?

I browse new. let me tell you. most of the crap posted needs downvotes. it is clickbait, it is political bullshit or it is some crackpot shit that makes flat earthers look smart. after sifting through post after post of hot garbage I might see 1 or 2 posts that spark my interest and this unfortunately is because they are on topics that draw a more emotional response. seriously people reading this right now who also browse by new know exactly what I am talking about. it is either this or there are 30 different versions of an existing front page story.

I browse new.

Jesus Christ are you some kind of a masochist?

Yeah I do that too cause it’s the only way to get in a thread in time to join in on some discussion.

But yes, 90% of posts on this are absolute nonsense. Either ridiculously straw man theories about silly things or partisan slingshots.

However, the absolute worst is any thread (imo) spouting any theory as 100% absolute fact without even close to enough evidence to do so. Doesn’t matter what the subject is; the amount of people jumping to conclusions on this sub is incredible.

Excellent comment. Yes, a lot of crap gets submitted to this sub.

Thank heavens for Rule 13. Hasn't been a panacea, but has certainly helped.

We are definitely being manipulated here. I just don't know from what faction it is coming from.

Look at the content making to to /all. More importantly pay attention to the content that used to make it to /all consistently and now is non-existent. You will find your ansers easily enough. Find out what you're not allowed to critisize.

"virtually every post"

so i did a random sample of the current "hot" posts

in order:

81%, 87%, 88%, 66%, 90%, 78% 86%, 92%, 70%, 88%

and the final ironic one, this post: 71%

most stuff posted in new REGARDLESS of sub is pretty garbage. so they will almost all get ~50% upvote rates.

I'm actually happy about this. As frustrating as I find some of the popular posts on here, I actually think this sub is one of the few, maybe the only political sub, that isn't an echo chamber. I often find people from all sides making intelligent arguments, and everyone seems more concerned with individual freedoms and preserving life than they are with silly games of my guy beats your guy.

agreed.... says a lot that your comment is downvoted

In this day and age you would think an algorithm would be able to ferret out false down votes (or up votes).

Then the algorithm is discovered after a period of time and workarounds are implemented. Should reddit perhaps advocate for stronger identity verification?

Reddit needs to be dumpstersed completely.

The solution is to move to a platform that requires accounts to be purchased. A small amount per account, only a few dollars so it's not a barrier to entry for individual users. Accept crypto as payment so anonymity can be preserved. Use the money to pay for hosting so the site is never beholden to advertisers and is only about the exchange of information.

This one change would make it prohibitive for anyone to run or aquire an army of bots. It would have a huge knock-on benefit of enabling effective moderation, as people couldn't instantly and painlessly rereg and continue their griefing.

Prohibitive to anyone but the ruling oligarchy, who would not be hamstrung by monetary barriers to entry. Why not instead validate user accounts (while retaining screen names) with multiple factors of state identification?

Because without anonymity the free exchange of ideas is greatly inhibited.

And, it's not just about the barrier to entry. It's about enforceability. If accounts are free, banning does nothing. Sure a company or state entity will drop $100k on bots. But not if they're banned within the week and all that money did was make venue for free expression more resilient.

It's a it's not especially difficult to ferret out bots, especially with machine learning tools. If it were made a priority, and you figure out how to avoid playing whack-a-mole(which the registration fee accomplishes)

Sadly, anonymity is largely dead on the internet. Current surveillance tools coupled with the tracking of banking transactions would already unmask all but a tiny minority with extensive financial resources. Like I said in another thread within the past hour, why not make the current internet a non-private and multi-factor authenticated network, and then make public decentralized meshnets the private and anonymous option? Connect banking and social media to the non-private authenticated network, and connect anonymous IRC, 4chan, non-voting discussion boards to the private decentralized network, and get the best of both worlds.

In an ideal world, sure.

But I'm talking something you could do today, with a small team. Not a massive sweeping infrastructure-style change that would be difficult to get off the ground for huge reasons.

Privacy being hard to come by these days is a compelling argument for why we need a discussion forum where anonymity is assured to the highest degree possible. Otherwise paying for accounts will have a chilling effect on discussion. Complete, total privacy need not be assured to give the feeling of being able to have a candid discussion, which is the goal. It is the difference between knowing that nothing stands between your words and your identity, and knowing that there are as many roadblocks as possible.

I'm talking something you could do today, with a small team.

There are efforts underway: /r/darknetplan
Please help organize and deploy solutions around your city, where local meshnet groups don't already exist.

No thanks, we're actually having a different discussion and you're being really off-putting. Doing more harm to your cause than help.

No thanks, we're actually having a different discussion and you're being really off-putting. Doing more harm to your cause than help.

Huh? For pointing you toward a meshnet subreddit?

For constantly trying to shift the discussion to your pet topic when that's not at all what we're talking about.

I mentioned meshnets twice and honestly thought they were very relevant to the discussion, but apparently they don't fit into your predefined box of privacy topics, so you're attacking my character? Be more flexible and open to new ideas.

I'm very interested in meshnets.

The subject wasn't privacy topics, it was a scheme for a discussion forum that fixes what is broken about reddit.

I've done nothing to attack your character, you invented that out of thin air.

You still fail to respond to any points that I have made.

Reddit the company doesn't care to, they actively profit off of different interests competing over the website as a battlefield of ideas.

You're completely correct, this would be trivial to protect against, if they had any interest in doing so.

Yup. Noted.

So meta

Well, I think we all know where it's coming from.

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/08/14/israel-students-social-media/2651715/

Always check the crossposts

I think this how they operate. Any "hot" article gets focused sitewide, with heavier emphasis on subs where that content might make it to /rising.

This is because the shills main objective is about controlling the content on /all. They will go to any sub that has the means to make it there and manipulate the vote count. Have invisible non-active users sit in said sub to increase the threshold of making it to all.

This is why the default in preferences is don't show if 4 or more downvotes. This is a Pollyanna function, everything is pretty, and positive, and good and all those creepy independent thinkers get sunk beneath the oily surface.

Yep.

Honestly, hiding comments that have been downvoted enough is a disgusting policy. There should be a way to turn it off on certain subreddits.

This tactic is used sitewide. It's how they took over and continue to maintain politics, they also actively do it in WOTB, but the mods there sticky the posts that get brigaded.

I'm a bot, bleep, bloop. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:

• [/r/betternews] Virtually every new post on this sub (regardless of quality) is downvoted right after it's posted and subsequent upvotes are automatically countered by an equal number of downvotes to maintain ~50% rating. Only a small number of posts get enough upvotes to escape this fate.

&nbsp;^{If you follow any of the above links, please respect the rules of reddit and don't vote in the other threads. (Info / Contact)}

That's been going on since before the election

Across reddit is like that. Even when upvoting happens it usually just 1to5 then post dies. New sections arr the achillies heel of this site.

Unless you want to reach the frontpage, the votes are pretty ineffectual. The number of comments is a much better indication of a thread's popularity, so the best way to verify your contribution is being received is to have a vpn acct and a lurker acct see your posts.

Came her to say this! I posted a yahoo article yesterday claiming a kid from Santa Fe was shot in the head and played baseball the next day and I immediately got like 20-30 comments but could never get past 5 upvotes. It’s back to zero upvotes now. I also found it funny that the title on yahoo changed about hour after my post, might be a coincidence but I believe it’s the power we have as a group here. We can beat this. When I scroll the conspiracy subreddit now I usually switch from hot articles to new articles and browse that way. It makes a big difference. We can outsmart them. I’m sure we can come up with a way to beat the bots.

A blanket suppression software? Literally limit the amount of info that gets shared in this critical hour?

it is a terrible technique, because nobody cares about stupid Forum rank numbers votes magical fairy systems

The people doing the manipulation seem to care.

ma ran on Jerusalem.

The rest is all propaganda from CNN.

yeah but they should know they are unsuccessful

No idea what you're quoting, but they seem to be achieving their goals very successfully.

It's about the manipulation of sentiment, not the karma, you should know.

ery successfully.

It's about the manipulation of sentiment, not the karma, you should know.

yeah but they are not working at all. They are failing at manipulation. They are losing.

That's not the way it works. If you control what people see, which this vote manipulation unarguably does in a broad sense, you have effectively influenced sentiment. Period.

People like to pretend they are above this style of manipulation, but there is a damn good reason why the advertising industry is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. This shit works, and is getting more effective every day as the tools are improved.

But nobody on reddit is influenced by Karma Caramel. Im sorry but control systems on the internet dont work.

people just read stuff, browse, and form opinions that way

When you control what people see when they read and browse, because you have gamed the mechanism which shows them content, you control which opinions they form. That's what we're talking about.

Correct. Good points. Well-said.

Browsing by new is still a decent way to escape this to at least some extent on an individual basis.

Thank you!

That's probably the best way to browse here right now, but it also completely does away with what is supposed to make this place work: leveraging the group to aggregate worthwhile content.

It's like pushing a broken car and trying to hop in and coast on the downhill parts, when you'd be so much better off getting a bike.

Only, no one is making any bikes :/

do you understand now?

I would still like to know how you managed to quote some one else's completely unrelated reply while responding to me, you just ignored that so I'm having to address it in a separate reply. That looks fishy as fuck.

I dont know in my inbox things sometimes glitch out of order.

What is fishy is how you are desperate to make people Believe that down votes or up votes matter to viewer opinion or credibility.

There is no desperation on my part, bit you do seem eager to twist my words into a strawman.

I've never indicated that this is about karma, in fact I've directly stated that it isn't. It's not about upvotes giving credibility, you're completely misunderstanding. Wilfully or otherwise.

Upvoted content is given prominence. Downvoted is hidden. You know this, every redditor does.

This is the mechanism by which influence is peddle. If you control what is seen, you control what is thought and what is done. Again, advertising. Multi hundred billion dollar a year industry. For a reason.

Perhaps it is a conspiracy

Yea... I don't even bother anymore. I tried to share a conspiracy song I made here and within in 2 minutes it was just downvoted into oblivion without any comments. you need a robo army to get anything noticed here.

Would there be significant downsides to revealing the accounts that have downvoted a post in the reddit API? I realize that vote fuzzing is a thing, but are there any better proposed solutions to help stomp out vote manipulation? Help the community to assist the in house anti-evil team.
I'd like to see rows downvoter of stats like:
account age, number of comment downvotes/upvotes in the last 48 hours, number of post downvotes/upvotes in last 48 hours, number of reddit accounts active from the same IP in the last 48 hours.

Issue with this is that large organisations all have the same public facing IP address, for example any university will have thousands of legitimate reddit accounts with all the students on the school wifi.

That's accurate, perhaps something like a hash of the MAC address, IP, and browser fingerprint? But then there are virtual machines to get around that. My intent is metrics that would help the community identify malicious behavior, without undermining vote fuzzing or bolstering bot farms.

Browser fingerprints are identical among mobile clients ( my iOS 11.0 will appear to be identical to all other iOS 11.0 brokers ) , and MAC addresses are not easily available to the application layer ( without querying they ARP cache ) )

On that note Mac spoofing and fuzzing user agent strings would be a literal no brainer for a bot author .

Do you have suggestions as to what kind of unique identifiers or metrics would help alleviate the bot problem?

There arn't any good ones really, if your computer can do it so can a bot, I can pay 30 cents USD to have 1000 captcha's solved in under 2 minutes.

Really anything which a computer can provide is something that can be forged rather easily, especially if a state level adversary is involved, so requiring a phone number or something like that isn't even a speed bump.

We could come up with some form of system where either people ( or individual computers at the time of manufacturer ) are assigned a private key in such a manner that it cannot be replicated (or even read ) by its owner ( i.e. hardware which is specifically designed to simply sign data with no access to the private key. ) Any system we come up with should be embedded in such a manner that any attempt at removal or replacement results in death or permanent hardware failure.

and then we keep a list of public keys which match said private keys, we can use this information for all sorts of identification from taxes, to online banking, to drivers licences, etc.

Now this has all sorts of horrible privacy issues since now anonymity is impossible, but it does solve the problem of bots.

Great points. I feel that there should be an intended divide between "non-private, multi-factor identified" networks used for banking and social media, and "private, anonymous" networks that are open to places like IRC, 4chan, and other systems used for wide open discourse where masks are allowed and encouraged. I see the existing internet as one, and public meshnets as potential for the other.

How did this post escape the trap, OP?

Well, I have to ask, how did your post escape this?

I've noticed this. I think its because you need a catchy title to get enough people to upvote it and the bots/topmindsshills have only about 10 votes to throw down at you.

I’m no shill... but some posts here are either utter shite or clutching at straws in a real desperate way.

ShareBlue vs qdudes vs conspiritypes.

This is a radical idea, but mayyyybbbbeee, it’s because people don’t believe or agree with what’s getting posted?

Take voting away. Discussion should dictate interest. Make the sub capable of viewing high discussions. Allow users to eliminate threads to easier sift through the clutter.

There's no "this is belief" in a conspiracy sub. As much as people want to belong to a club, and feel accepted and understanding, doesn't mean this is that place. We are all our worst enemies in a sub of complete deceit. So, I'll say it again, conspiracy subs are strictly for making content available. What makes some forums better than others is the ability to it through the content to find the discussion you want to be apart of.

Always check new and controversial. Votes and karma doesn't count when it comes to truth.

regardless of quality

is it really tho?

not even a graph or chart of something?

So link to 5-10 "quality" posts that got downvoted ... you can't

most new posts are just bullshit and thats why they get downvoted

I used to browse by new every time.

It's garbage, straight up. Multiple threads of the same shit repeated. Felt like I was in league of legends.

I don't even bother anymore to help this sub filter shit.

You go to new and tell me it isn't shit 99% of the time.

I used to play the game of getting rid of shit. Y'all whine about people who care. WTF!

This ain't bots, beyond people posting garbage. Down you go so no one has to see you. I'd refresh new constantly and downvote. So there's one automatic downvote if I was awake. Fuck the people posting garbage.

That's Reddit's vote fuzzing, m8.

Think about how many counter narrative stories had there roots in r/conspiracy.

we talked about sorting by controversial too much so now they are trying to flood that search method with stupid articles too.

basically this place has a white noise generator turned on 24/7 and any time some on yells it gets turned up to match it.

10 word titles with no SS, link, or any info at all get downvoted by me. When asked about it OP's usually say "I saw it on 4chan"... Very downvote worthy in my opinion.

Post history checks out, 2 years of inactivity straight to slandering this sub and the people that try to use it to have honest discussions and debates.

Back to The_Donald?

Vote fuzzing does not vary it by 10%.

It can -- I have posts on subs where I'm considered more controversial where vote fuzzing would shift me from +3 to -2.

So could the conclusion be that only about 10 percent of all posts made are worthy of getting upvotes? And the rest are just not well-liked by the people who vote on the /new tab?

So basically, the subs accused of brigading here also have similar, eerie voting patterns.

Yup, nothing to see here.

That's completely normal.

and completely useless

JTRIG, online manipulation. https://www.hooktube.com/watch?v=QxAd0n2c5M8

But nobody on reddit is influenced by Karma Caramel. Im sorry but control systems on the internet dont work.

people just read stuff, browse, and form opinions that way