Reddit's admin let shills do pretty much whatever they want. Some of these shills defend the interests of corporations like exxonmobil. Some of them defend secret police agencies like the nsa, cia, and fbi.

I am not interested in arguing the truth of these statements or the ethics of these organizations practices in this thread. While this is an important discussion, it does not require my participation and if you support my idea I hope that you can trust me when I tell you that I do not have time to engage in this debate right now for good reason. If you do have the time to engage in this discussion, know that any support or insight you have to offer is greatly appreciated.

I have spent much of the last several months extensively documenting shilling on reddit, and I spent much of the year before that researching many of the corporations and agencies which take advantage of reddit. More than enough to prove the claims I am making in this post.

If atko is interested, I will begin to share this information & proof with him and work with him, the moderators, and the users of whoaverse to make it publicly available in the most effective way possible and also design a way to deal with shills from a moderator's and administrative perspective to ensure that one of the worst things about reddit is minimized here to the greatest extent possible.

Please PM me if you are interested, atko, and we can go from there. I will be able to check this accounts PMs about once a day for the next week or so; my computer use beyond this will be very minimal besides what I would need to help atko.

In some ways what I am discussing in this post is just the tip of the iceberg. The information that I have is more than enough to spark a scandal, if not several, which could draw away a significant portion of reddit's userbase. This information could be a catalyst & help whoaverse take off when the time is right if we are proactive about minimizing the impact and proliferation of shilling.

I strongly believe that shilling is a litmus test when it comes to whether or not whoaverse, should it come to supplant reddit, will be able to avoid the myriad problems that plague reddit today.

Ideally, after beginning to work with atko, we will make a post about this on reddit. Because shills exist, anyone who is not a shill arguably has a very compelling reason to support a "no shill tolerance" policy because they know they are not a shill even if they don't know who is one.

This means that uniting against shills, even if only conceptually at first, is one way we can work to undermine divide and conquer techniques. Even though it can be hard at first, and at the margins, to determine who is or is not a shill, this question is secondary because if we agree that there are shills and that shilling is a problem then we will be able to figure out the rest together by drawing from what has happened and is happening with reddit right now.

With the existence of the whoaverse partnership program, a "no shill tolerance" policy is especially important. There is a huge difference between the kind of work that dedicated investigative journalists and critical scholars do and what cia shills are paid to do. Being against shilling is not the same as being against people getting paid to produce media content.

We should support funding for investigative journalism and critical scholarship, and whoaverse's partnership program could be an amazing vehicle for organizing and proliferating this kind of work and creating jobs for people who want to expose government and corporate wrongdoing. We need people to expose the fucked up practices of governments and corporations and whoaverse could work with people who can do this effectively.

With payment known and transparent it becomes easier to distinguish between shilling, which in this context more or less means "getting paid to do things like defend unethical corporations and corrupt intelligence agencies," and "getting paid to do important work that will help make the world a better place." While the former tends to happen covertly, someone who is truly critical of the CIA and secret police in general would have no real need to conceal the fact that they are being paid to do this even if they may want to remain anonymous.

Shilling may be a difficult problem to tackle, but minimizing it is certainly possible and there is more than enough evidence from reddit that this is going on and that it is fucked up. The question is what do we do about it, not whether we should do something about it.

(FYI: I am not saying that "everyone who defends the cia is a shill." Shilling is a bit more nuanced than this. The bigger picture of shilling on reddit, which includes censorship, moderation, and corrupt admin as well as propaganda, provides the context needed to appreciate why this is the case. Besides, the CIA wouldn't use propaganda if it didn't work sometimes.)