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Comment by criticaltinker | Hacker News Reader

I don't care whose side you're on - compared to ten years ago, the front page of Reddit has absolutely become infiltrated with deliberately crafted narratives clearly intended to push certain agendas.

This call to action by "volunteer moderators" is ironic in that sense, because there are likely even bigger more impactful systematic campaigns of disinformation going on - see this recent discussion from yesterday for some great insight into why and how these campaigns may be orchestrated [1].

[1] Almost all of the top subreddits are moderated by the same people (291 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28312261

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> volunteer moderators

There's a conspiracy theory that they're not actually volunteers - or rather, that they're paid by outside interests to steer the conversation the way certain outside interests want it steered. I'm not necessarily convinced, but it would explain a bit.

There's another conspiracy theory about the most influential powermod for over a decade, /u/maxwellhill. The account was a mod of some of the largest subreddits out there, and regularly made posts that hit the front page. The account went completely silent on June 30, 2020, just two days before the arrest of Ghislaine Maxwell.

Adding to the coincidences (account name match, date ghosted match), Ghislaine attended the Conde Naste christmas party, as reported by then-Reddit CEO Pao (https://nypost.com/2020/07/08/ex-reddit-ceo-ellen-pao-knew-g...).

Quite interesting. Never any explanation from anyone about why this most influential mod just disappeared.

You mean like how housing cost discussions here are always looking to blame zoning laws, to name one example? Pretty sure at this point that even HN has a heady dose of controlled opposition.

Hm, interesting - I hadn’t ever seen that on here, although zoning laws is the only explanation I can think of. Why do you think housing costs are so high? It can’t be a conspiracy - or if so, who are the conspirators?

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