It's wild. It really is. I made a post on reddit about it this morning.

I honestly thought the whole italyate premise was pretty outrageous and implausible. I was the first to post a thread on /r/conspiracy about it right after christmas (found it on patrick byrne's twitter).

When I posted another a week later, I found via search only one other thread after mine...basically crickets on /r/conspiracy.

I think part of the reason I dismissed it initially was that I wasn't seeing it anywhere.

Then all of the sudden it started exploding! But there was SO much other stuff going on, it tended to get lost in the fray. But you see, over the years I've learned to figure out what the juicy conspiracies are by how much they're buried.

There's a notably different voting pattern between a thread that's just a shitty ass conspiracy that nobody liked and a thread with a juicy conspiracy that gets actively suppressed.

For example, they often don't vote "down ballot" (lol) when they brigade, so the comments in brigaded threads will often have as many as a dozen or two upvotes, while the thread itself is kept at zero.

The bots or whatever they use generally leave the comments alone and just hit the thread, effectively burying it anyway. But the real engagement from users can be seen in the comment scores.

As for ITALYGATE, I noticed my threads getting hit HARD...even harder than the usual election interference stuff, which is weird, because they usually leave alone the certifiably kooky stuff.

They weren't doing that. Does that mean it's 100% true? Of course not, but it means it's something they don't want us discussing.

The very strange thing is a lot of italian natives have been commenting on that thread...it's definitely gotten the attention of some italian subs or something.

Not only that, but I got an unprecedented number of personal attacks for stickying it...in PM and in the actual thread itself. Check the removed comments, it's nuts.

This is a hot issue somehow, and having it stickied on /r/conspiracy has legitimately ruffled some feathers IMHO.

What "reddit conspiracies" was the senator talking about last night literally on the floor of congress?

I want to note that the mods there still have my thread stickied. That actually takes some balls, and props to them. I do trust the team there to do what's right, but the reason I'm so "hated" is that I play the "aggressive" role when it comes to the /r/all brigades, and I fear my absence will hurt the sub in the long run, which partly explains the shills' gleeful cacophony right now.