I can see how you would think that a news aggregator is more prone to manipulation than your friends, but surely you can concede that it's also a broader sample. The problem with a conspiracy theory is that you have rebuttal-proof circumstantial evidence: there is literally nothing I can do to convince you that there isn't a conspiracy, except to point out that everyone else who sees conspiracies like this is wrong. As you put it on your old blog:
"Don't see purpose where there isn't.
Or better still, the positive version:
See randomness."
This doesn't seem to be a discussion of politics. It sounds more like psychology to me: you're very surprised that reddit is behaving in a way that you wouldn't have predicted, and so you're creating an extra phenomenon to explain it, instead of revising your original theory. It's a little pre-Copernican.
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I can see how you would think that a news aggregator is more prone to manipulation than your friends, but surely you can concede that it's also a broader sample. The problem with a conspiracy theory is that you have rebuttal-proof circumstantial evidence: there is literally nothing I can do to convince you that there isn't a conspiracy, except to point out that everyone else who sees conspiracies like this is wrong. As you put it on your old blog:
"Don't see purpose where there isn't.
Or better still, the positive version:
See randomness."
This doesn't seem to be a discussion of politics. It sounds more like psychology to me: you're very surprised that reddit is behaving in a way that you wouldn't have predicted, and so you're creating an extra phenomenon to explain it, instead of revising your original theory. It's a little pre-Copernican.