48 upvotes, 3 direct replies (showing 3)
I see alot of people bitching about Jews, holocaust, conspiratards and brigades, and yet, no one dares adress another issue. I don't participate or post in r/conspiracy or r/conspiratard because frankly, I don't care. I am however an avid follower of XKCD for years now, and what your boy u/flytape and his buddy u/KamensGhost are doing in r/xkcd is inexcusable. Freedom of speech my ass. They have taken over a sub they had no participation in before being made mods by u/soccer, started with deleting comments of those questioning them or disagreeing with them, deleted all posts about the mod situation, started banning contributors in the r/xkcd sub AND blacklisting and deleting comic strips making fun of conspiracy theories, WHICH WERE ALWAYS A STAPLE OF XKCD and other strips they personally disagree with, like Pickup Artist. If that is NOT a hostile takeover and attempt to censor and screw a subreddit, I don't know what is. How do you excuse that? What "freedom of speech" are you exactly defending? Your own, over everyone else's INCLUDING the freakin' comic creator? I see alot of talk about shills. Here's a thought, conspiracy fans: If shills do exist, I'm pretty sure they are professional and smart enough to integrate themselves in a community and assume positions of responsibillity, and later use them to discredit said community with their actions. It's called being an "agent provocateur". Right now your subreddit is the focus of a lot of shit-talking and criticism because some people that are mods and frequent contributors in your subreddit are pissing all over other subreddits they had no business with in the first place and generally being total assholes to other communities. Just food for thought. There, I vented, go ahead and ban me now, defenders of "freedom".
Comment by pimpst1ck at 30/01/2014 at 16:04 UTC
19 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I wish you the best of luck with restoring your subreddit. I've heard that the creator of /r/xkcd, Randall Munroe, is far from happy with the /u/soccer and /u/flytape situation.
Comment by dsprox at 30/01/2014 at 16:51 UTC
11 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Dude I think you hit the nail right on the head with the agent provocateur call.
/r/conspiracy did start out legitimate, but its' legitimacy has been steadily waning over the past year and a half.
It truly does seem like a professionally enacted multi-tiered plan, which I will try and deliniate.
1. Infiltration, work up a huge fan base ( or sock puppet it yourself ) so that you can call a mod vote to get yourself instated as mod.
2. Delegitimize the sub by submitting pure lunacy and other "conspiracy theories" that are flat out wrong (space lizards and faked moon landings) so as to discredit the entire sub, putting people off from coming here and finding out about factual information.
3. Create blatant opposition (/r/conspiratard) that masquerades as friendly counterpoint (while blatantly mocking the opposition so as to further provoke them) so that you can further deride your opposition as being "paranoid that you're out to get them", and that they're all angry crazy people when they provoke people of lesser intelligence to lash out with hateful comments.
4. Covertly brigade submissions/comments through irc channels and NP links and other off reddit communication modes.
5. Profit
Comment by [deleted] at 31/01/2014 at 11:26 UTC
0 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Boom!