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Comment by thomasz | Hacker News Reader

FFS, not that crap, not again, not here.

It's not "crap". If a group of people made a concerted effort to apply these principles to almost any discussion forum out there, they could very effectively control it. And it's a bit naive to assume they already don't.

Setting paranoia about you being one of them aside, and asking you to set aside your kneejerk reaction to being against this being posted, would you care to elaborate? I've never seen this before and it seems quite interesting.

Yea, they have an entire army dedicated to nothing but trolling the brave enemies of the state who converge at places like www.abovetopsecret.com and dailypail.com. FFS. Those places are a pit of back stabbing, turf wars, elaborated socket puppetry and so on because they attract a crowd that is borderline crazy, and a few trolls preying on them.

If you build a place for destructive and often psychotic people, you would need a dedicated three letter agency to prevent them from going on each others throat.

Your second point undermines the first. Essentially, you are making the case that the government should monitor and attempt to pacify groups of crazies.

The point that's being made is that it's not that hard to disrupt a functioning online community, so you wouldn't even need an army. You could probably do it with a staff of a dozen or less, and honestly looking at how places like reddit and slashdot have transformed over the years I really wouldn't be surprised if there was at least some influence by government agencies(how do those same 5 military propaganda images keep getting to the front page? I'd also be curious to see how those getting to the frontpage compares to recruitment needs for the military. Not saying that it's a conspiracy, but it would be an interesting thing to examine). The tone of those places has changed, and any intelligent, valid criticism of the status quo is consistently ignored and rallied against. I don't know if it's just because people are by and large impulsive and unable to handle criticism, or because of a conspiracy, but the former lends itself to control by the latter.

It would be a bit naive to rule it out completely, but it would be pretty silly to say for certain that it's a conspiracy.

The author simply observes some negative tendencies in online communities that can easily explained by simple social dynamics and asserts that sinister cabal is responsible. That is his whole point, and he doesn't argue very good. For the love of god, look at the first point! FORUM SLIDING my ass. To make that work, you'd have to fake a dozen threads to drown a real one. And you'd have fake them convincingly, or they would simply be ignored.

I don't want to get overly confrontational, but your lament about reddit's decline goes into the same direction. That community has grown by a thousandfold. It's self image of a salon for educated and cultivated discourse is a sick joke. You don't need a conspiracy to explain how those pictures show up on the front page. They carry a simple, emotional message. Reddit's user base likes them, as they like rage comics, pictures of cute animals, stupid memes and rape jokes.

>how do those same 5 military propaganda images keep getting to the front page?

I don't subscribe to the front page reddits anymore, could you tell me what images you mean?

Before ending up featured on HackerNews by way of the illustrious Cryptome, the various components of this document had a rich life of their own.

For example, the first part was spotted 3 years ago on http://www.infoterror.com/ . More recently, it showed up on EncyclopediaDramatica https://encyclopediadramatica.se/Forum_COINTELPRO_Techniques

Even more recently, it was the subject of a great many enlightened and thought provoking discussions on reddit: http://ww.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/duplicates/v7abp/

The lineage of the other four parts can be found easily by googling representative sentence fragment. For example, https://www.google.com/search?q=fall-back+positions.+Using+a...

For extra-credit, enumerate all the techniques from the linked document that could be construed to apply to my post.

Thank you for this post explaining the background of some of this.

I submitted it here after stumbling onto it at cryptome. I wanted to see if it would be suppressed -- it has not been!

Sorry to annoy the oldgs

The number of low karma accounts posting below is suspicious in and of itself.

subtle troll is subtle

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