It’s kinda interesting to see how the original feedback from the community was (clearly in favor of the blackout) and how the feedback looks now. There is definitely something very shady going on.

There’s definitely some sort of skullduggery going on, but I can’t quite figure it out. There are a bunch of posts in the “r/GuildWars is open” thread made by accounts with zero prior connection to that sub. (And several more by accounts with only a handful of posts in the distant past.) But why? Why would anyone come to a sub that they’ve never participated in and pretend to be a community member criticizing the blackout? What do they have to gain from doing that?

Even more curious, one of these accounts had zero other posts in r/guildwars, but thousands of posts in other subs. After I called them out for astroturfing, they deleted their account, their very, very old and well-established account. Who does that? The only explanation I can think of is that the account was compromised and the one astroturf post in r/guildwars and the deletion of the account weren’t done by the original owner. Puzzling.

Another account with zero prior posts in r/guildwars was keen to assert that community migration away from reddit was impossible, and discord was definitely not a suitable place to migrate. That was pretty obviously an official reddit sock puppet.

One possible clue is the odd behavior of the user “Genesor” who insists that the blackout is “100% political” and anyone who denies that is “lying to yourself” and that me checking up on the post histories of posters in that thread is “classic behavior for a part of the political spectrum.” (In point of fact, I got the idea to check it from Genesor themself, who claimed that “Most of the people that answered the first post were not GW players.” Ironically, while Genesor claims to be a DoA SC player, they have zero prior posts to r/guildwars.) Genesor’s post history suggests some far right views, so maybe someone’s got the maga crowd convinced that “woke libruls” are behind the blackout?

Aside, Genesor plainly made that claim in bad faith, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s false. It might be worth investigating the possibility that we got astroturfed from two sides.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to not being on reddit and hopefully not having to deal with this sort of propaganda campaign again.

I am sure @[email protected] will get right to it, once they have settled in :D

Afaik @[email protected] is feeling under the weather.

AFAIK downvotes can be disabled already and there is a discussion about disabling upvotes (or rather hiding scores) on instance/community level, too.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2669

Users can decide to not Show Scores in their Settings already.