I firmly believe Reddit is inserting hundreds/thousands of upvotes to drive shill comments to the top of threads in order to manipulate popular opinion in a particular direction. I've noticed a lot of threads lately where one or two comments have, say, 500 upvotes (at the top, of course) .. and all the rest of the comments are <50 upvotes. The top posts always have the most "extremist" views, and the ones below them tend to be more moderate. I've used that site for a decade and this type of pattern is relatively new.

The upvote/downvote system used by reddit (and the .win sites for that matter) is a very useful mechanism for manipulating popular opinion. Top comments and top posts tend to solidify overall community sentiment. Leading to what people on reddit have complained about for years: the hivemind effect.

Think about it.. most people only read headlines. Even fewer people venture into the comments. Of those who venture into the comments, most don't read them all, they just skim through the top ones. So the majority of users take the headline at face value, a subset of them get affirmation from the top comments. Very few see anything else.

Reddit has another problem, wherein dissenting opinions get downvoted and are literally hidden from view. The site grays out and collapses low scored comments, so they are seen by the smallest number of redditors. Those downvotes also tend to influence more downvotes (i.e. "everyone else dislikes this, so I guess I do too")

And since posts are driven by popularity, nothing posted that goes against the hivemind has any chance whatsoever of reaching the front page, or even get close to the top of any subreddits.

I believe Reddit's system was designed from the ground up for propaganda, information control, and influence.

Take some time to think about how the site works. It's very clear that it was engineered this way for a reason.

I firmly believe Reddit is inserting hundreds/thousands of upvotes to drive shill comments to the top of threads in order to manipulate popular opinion in a particular direction. I've noticed a lot of threads lately where one or two comments have, say, 500 upvotes (at the top, of course) .. and all the rest of the comments are <50 upvotes. The top posts always have the most "extremist" views, and the ones below them tend to be more moderate. I've used that site for a decade and this type of pattern is relatively new.

The upvote/downvote system used by reddit (and the .win sites for that matter) is a very useful mechanism for manipulating popular opinion. Top comments and top posts tend to solidify overall community sentiment. Leading to what people on reddit have complained about for years: the hivemind effect.

Think about it.. most people only read headlines. Even fewer people venture into the comments. Of those who venture into the comments, most don't read them all, they just skim through the top ones.

Reddit has another problem, wherein dissenting opinions get downvoted and are literally hidden from view. The site grays out and collapses low scored comments, so they are seen by the smallest number of redditors. Those downvotes also tend to influence more downvotes (i.e. "everyone else dislikes this, so I guess I do too")

And since posts are driven by popularity, nothing posted that goes against the hivemind has any chance whatsoever of reaching the front page, or even get close to the top of any subreddits.

I believe Reddit's system was designed from the ground up for propaganda, information control, and influence.

Take some time to think about how the site works. It's very clear that it was engineered this way for a reason.