Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Wow that's some incredible brigading. One of the most upvoted comments (it might be the most upvoted one, don't know) is at a mere 98.6K: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5h7gq8/i_was_goofy_at...

The most upvoted post is 283K: https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/5gn8ru/guardians_of_...

Considering how upvoted-items get more and more visible, and thus more and more upvotes, it's a huge achievement for a downvoted comment to have that much engagement.

edit: via r/subredditdrama, the most downvoted comments noted so far:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ListOfComments/wiki/downvoted

https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/7cicb7/user...

View on HN

> Wow that's some incredible brigading.

Is it really brigading? The entire gaming community hates those practices. Nobody is manipulating people to downvote this comment. It's genuine hate and digust. Paying the price of a game to unlock one single character is a joke.

EA's reply is also very bad. "The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes."

I fail to see how paying $80 gives players a sense of pride and accomplishment.

I mean "brigading" in the technical sense of people passing around the link and getting more people to pile on than would organically occur, not necessarily the astroturf connotation. Because for most users, comments under a certain threshold (-50) are hidden (but can be revealed manually). The entire r/Battlefront userbase is just 91K users.

I believe the comment received reddit gold specifically to keep it visible.

It's not a perfect measure, but there are about 90k subscribers for the subreddit and about 4x that number of downvotes.

Reddit encourages cross-posting. This thread for example https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/7cm3o8/the_...

There's also the fact that the main thread has 62.9k votes and is probably on the front-page. This make it so that every reddit users will go through it, see the horrible corporate answer and downvote it.

I myself am not subscribed to that subreddit and still downvoted that comment.

Edit: And there are probably people looking at https://www.reddit.com/user/EACommunityTeam directly.

Edit2: And it blew up on Twitter so that's a lot of the downvotes.

But this activity is considered to be a form of "brigading":

https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/24d8cj/whats_...

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

Brigading is not "illegal" on Reddit, but some subreddit's explicitly forbid cross-posting because of the brigading effect. Such subreddits require the use of the np.reddit.com domain, which points to a mirror of a Reddit thread while disabling vote functionality.

Looking at the Totes comment, I can see why: https://www.reddit.com/r/StarWarsBattlefront/comments/7cff0b...

That's a lot of linked subreddits, plus you've got people from HN and probably other places going to check out "the most downvoted comment in Reddit's history".

I did my part by upvoting the post and downvoting the game. EA is one he of a moneygrubber. Would even make the guys who buy games pirate it.

I would bet a lot of HN users that might not play Battlefront, or possibly not that many games at all anymore, still remember past EA shenanigans, and the EA wives stuff, so are willing to believe the accusations and vote accordingly. I count myself in the group somewhat (I'm playing games again recently, but not EA so much).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com