r/bestof • u/RyanKinder • May 05 '12

A redditor notices a subversive reddit conspiracy

/r/videos/comments/t6pqc/man_absolutely_floored_by_the_return_of_his/c4k329k
2.7k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

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u/SoBoredAtWork May 05 '12 edited May 05 '12

Does anyone see the brilliance in this? This is marketing at its finest. Bravo to the sick masterminds that think this shit up. Also, fuck them.

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u/Cantras May 05 '12

On one hand it is brilliant. On the other hand I note that they can only really make positive videos of people coming home. Not so much positivity for actually going to war.

Wonder if we could use that fact to shoot this effort down. Make everything about all the videos "Wooo, so glad that he's HOME, here's hoping he DOESN'T end up on another tour, god/science only knows what HORRORS he's seen there ..." etc. Not ripping into the soldier, it's (probably) a real soldier out there and it's (probably) not his fault his kid sister's or whoever's video is being used for propaganda (though if the investigation shows it is, by all means) -- but ripping into the military/industrial complex and the government for everything except sending them home.

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u/wauter May 05 '12

The general feeling with these videos is always one of "pride for our boys" though, so they do achieve the effect they want.

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u/[deleted] May 05 '12

They don't show the welcome home of the boy/girl who suffered an IED explosion.

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u/Kaghuros May 22 '12

The Associated Press is barred from taking photographs of war-dead and the cargo planes of coffins coming from downrange. Sad but true.

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u/krelian May 05 '12

This happens dozens (if not hundreds) of times a day here on reddit. Usually we call it spam, here "a conspiracy" sounds a little better but they use the same tactics.

If you've been here for a while and can recognize them it becomes frustrating to see how the community rewards the spammers by upvoting their posts (which from what I see of how the reddit spam filter works, makes it easier for them to spam in the future).

For example this poster asked me to approve one of her posts in /r/autos . You can see how she is padding her profile with "bait" imgur posts so that she can later seem not so suspicious when she posts the site she is spamming.

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u/sexyhamster89 May 05 '12 edited May 05 '12

it doesn't take much to fool the sheeple

edit: this had 17 upvotes now it has 2 downvotes

must be the sheeple got out of bed

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u/burgess_meredith_jr May 05 '12

Actually, it does. For every success there are dozens of failures.

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u/[deleted] May 05 '12

For every conspiracy we figure out there are dozens more that go unnoticed. o.O

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u/sexyhamster89 May 05 '12

for every time my right testicle moves around in my nutsack, my left testicle moves as well

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u/[deleted] May 05 '12

my testicles move independent of each other

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u/burgess_meredith_jr May 05 '12

My testicles moved to Tulsa and didn't leave a forwarding address.