
Arstechnica.com Banned me for speaking up about Paid Bots - DeerSpotter
i joined the website in 2015 was a loyal visitor, apparently as soon as i started speaking up about all the paid shills and the vote hacking that was going on the Director there did not like this at all.<p>I was muted from speaking any longer on the boards of my first post. As a few weeks went by i kept seeing more and more subscribers that were voting up all the paid news mainstream media comments that were defending corporate honor but silencing with downvotes all the actual relevant comments in the news sources.<p>ArsTechnica has a system where they hide a comment if it goes below a certain vote threshold. This is now being abused by paid shills to hide all the relevant comments.<p>Just like Stackexchange, reddit, and all the other major players adopted systems about votemanipulation i started speaking up about it with ARS and they wouldnt have none of it.<p>Instead of speaking with me about it, i logged on today to see a message: You were banned because &quot;GoodBye&quot;.<p>If there are any websites like Toms and Gizmodo reading this please do an article on this. The website Arstechnica wants to play like big boys but now has lost any favor with us people who just want an unbiased news source.<p>They also leverage the paid subscribers to have more voting power, this shifts the comments to the most relevant section of the page. Thus eliminating &quot;QUICKLY&quot; all the most relevant comments that could help other people truly understand what is going on if the editor got it wrong.<p>Used to be about community. I was there before they switched out there new website theme, i was there when i heard about it through HackerNews. Yet being on there that long didn&#x27;t matter to them, a voice speaking the truth is always the first to be silenced.<p>This is not the ArsTechnica i grew up around.
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samizdis
Do you have any evidence to support this, or can you suggest steps that one
might take to replicate your experience and so help to confirm your
suspicions?

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DeerSpotter
Since i am banned i can no longer access any of my posts.

What you can do is this:

Look for the comments in areas where the articles talk about Apple, Microsoft
etc..

Look for the vote tally's (Hidden comments will have the same downvotes)
+/-(3-6votes) as the next comment. (next comment has similar votes that are
upvoted).

You will notice the hidden comments in these type of articles are usually
enough to warrant investigations themselves.

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samizdis
I did as you suggested but saw no trends that would suggest organised
manipulation of comment votes. As for "paid shills", that is entirely
supposition on your part. Be aware that there are genuine "fanbois" of Apple,
of MS, of Android etc, who are often vociferous and even mob-handed in their
devotion. This doesn't imply any orchestration or even complicity by
Arstechnica.

