I was created by a small study group to explore technical aspects of the Disqus platform.
Not long after this creation some of the people in that small study group noticed that they were suddenly getting a lot of downvotes. Of course downvotes were hidden at that time so they didn't know who was doing the downvoting. These downvotes were being applied in the hundreds.
Members of that small group decided to established some benchmarks. By that I mean they bookmarked some of their old posts which were around a year old, two years old, three years old, and so on. They then screen capped those benchmarks at regular intervals.
Some patterns seemed to appear, but they couldn't be certain if they were seeing a real effect or statistical noise. There were too many variables to eliminate. So then they sent me in.
You see, no conflict was required for the items I was exploring on the Disqus system. I had never set out to bother anyone on Disqus. I was unsullied, without an enemy in the world. Because of this I was an ideal control variable in this test.
At the start of March of this year I deliberately started to irritate Expect Resistance.
( https://disqus.com/by/eriisthescourgeofofdisqus/ )
In less than a day the downvotes started. Of course members of the small group couldn't see who was doing the downvoting, but they could see that suddenly I was being downvoted all the way back to my oldest available post. They could also see that the downvotes continued at a brisk pace for the next two weeks.
A couple of weeks ago, Disqus returned the user ability to see the downvote option. It was revealed that a group of at least 48 identities, each of which using the screen name "Flagged" was responsible for almost all for the downvoting I was sent to probe.
Unsurprisingly, in most instances "Flagged" represented all but one or two of my downvotes. In many cases that meant that "Flagged" was 28 or 29 out of 30 downvotes. After a couple of weeks the downvote attack on my identity slowed.
The only person I had ever had any negative interaction with was Expect Resistance.
So here is a summary of my observations.
Expect Resistance was the only person I had any conflict with on Disqus ever.
On the day after I annoyed her, every comment I made was downvoted back to my very first comment.
This went on for about two weeks and then continued intermittently. New identities with the screen name "Flagged" would downvote each of my comments from one to four times per day. The result was that "Flagged" downvoted my oldest comments about 28 times each and my newest comments have progressively fewer downvotes. "Flagged" may have downvoted all of my comments more than four times per day on occasion, but the most I noticed in a single day was four times.
Almost all of my downvotes were from one of the many identities called "Flagged".
When Disqus revealed the downvotes, only people who quarreled with Expect Resistance were downvoted by the many "Flagged" identies.
The conclusion is simple. Expect Resistance has control of the "Flagged" identities and uses them to downvote people whom she doesn't like.
Isn't it obvious?
