Part of the issue is that after a while we tend to forget that the cases that turned out to be true were dismissed as conspiracy theories at the time. In recent memory for example, a lot of claims about the capabilities and application of the US signal intelligence apparatus abroad (especially in allied coununtries) were dismissed as conspiracy theories prior to Snowden. If you talk to a lot of people today, they will tend to remember it more as a "we kinda' always knew, but just didn't have confirmation" situation than a "I'm sure the NSA is doing _something_, but there is no way it would be this extensive" situation.
Great example, this was the first time I noticed the phenomena my original comment was referring to. Everyone "normal" described this stuff as tinfoil hat and even the people slightly outside overton window never suspected it was as bad as the reality turned out. But, everyone just instantly switched to "yeah we knew that" and didn't update any beliefs or priors
>everyone just instantly switched to "yeah we knew that"
This is an example of a very common mistake that leads to a lot of animosity, which is that "those people who said X" and "these people saying they never said X" are the same people (this is fueled by the misunderstanding that there are essentially only two groups of people, which is an illusion that most political systems reinforce).
The idea that Ghislaine Maxwell was one of the most powerful mods on Reddit, with close connections to the founders and admins, was widely derided at the time, but is probably true.
There's a mountain of circumstantial evidence including confirmation from Ellen Pao in a since-deleted tweet. The only rebuttals came from a newly appointed mod on reddit who claimed to have spoken to the user shortly after the arrest (but provided no evidence, the story was inconsistent and they have never spoken of this again), and a scathing article in Vice mocking the idea as a conspiracy theory, but again providing no evidence and it turns out that Vice clearly benefited from a business relationship with /u/maxwellhill
If you're looking for something cast-iron then I don't have it, but this is really a numbers game given that we only need 33 bits of information to deanonymise people on the internet. So let's count them and I'll let you decide how many bits to award each nugget.
1. The account's name is maxwellhill and Ghislaine Maxwell's surname is Maxwell and used to live at a place she referred to as Maxwell Hill.
2. The account was the first to reach 1m reddit karma and in the congratulatory post Alexis Ohanian revealed that he knew the poster in real life and that they'd been there since almost the beginning.
3. Ghislaine Maxwell is known to have attended events with Reddit staff in the early days, as confirmed by former CEO of reddit Ellen Pao.
4. maxwellhill has a December birthday, Ghislaine Maxwell's birthday is 25th December.
5. maxwellhill stopped posting just 2 days before GM's arrest, previously they'd posted almost every day for 14 years.
6. The few gaps when maxwellhill was not posting align with dates GM is known to have attended events including her mother's funeral.
7. GM's father was a known and prolific media manipulator, maxwellhill was repeatedly accused of manipulating reddit before the arrest.
8. maxwellhill posted prolifically about ocean conservation, GM had a startup called TerraMar which was focussed on ocean conservation.
9. maxwellhill mostly uses British English, GM is from Britain.
10. maxwellhill repeatedly complained about over-zealous child protection laws, posted articles suggesting CSAM should be legalised.
11. maxwellhill was careful to stress the difference between pedophilia and ephebophilia - a distinction important to Epstein and his apologists but not to most normal people.
12. maxwellhill has still not posted to reddit since the arrest, despite it having significant political and financial value.
13. After all of the noise of the accusations, no one at Reddit has actually denied that GM was maxwellhill.
I'm not saying this is conclusive, hence saying "probably", but that's a lot of bits.
I think the main thing people were pointing to was that account was extremely active then suddenly went inactive at the same time of Ghislaine's arrest. Been a while so there was probably other stuff too but that's the main one I recall.
Not particularly convincing, they seem just more like the kind of person you'd expect to be a reddit admin, i.e. a dodgy pedo incel male somewhat in the same area as /u/violentacrez (summary here for those unfamiliar: https://www.gawker.com/5950981/unmasking-reddits-violentacre...).
> I befriended a Korean pastor and his wife (long story there) where I live and we would meet occassionally for dinner.
> One day he asked if I could help teach some of his "students" conversational English. I didn't realise that he meant adults undergoing intensive training in Korea and abroad as missionaries for posting to other parts of the world. I thought he meant local teenagers who wanted to be more conversant in English - pronunciation, diction etc
> So I volunteered.
So, if people start looking for reddit accounts that mention maxwell and dodgy stuff, I can see why they'd stop posting.
I think part of the reason this gets so easily dismissed is that people still see reddit as a quaint little internet message board rather than an influential mainstream juggernaut that reaches half a billion people every month.
That account is/was enormously powerful, with the ability to determine which stories reached the frontpage and which didn't. That makes it politically and financially very valuable, and I don't think someone would just give up that because of association with Maxwell when they could have just posted a single comment saying "I am not Ghislaine Maxwell" and everyone would have forgotten about it.
MkUltra, COINTELPRO, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Project Mockingbird, Project Sunshine... There are thousands of conspiracies that have been vindicated, including ones that sounded completely insane at the time. You can just Google to answer your question with further examples.
Hey, can you please edit name-calling, personal attacks, and swipes out of your HN comments? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly and that's against the site guidelines. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
There’s gotta be something better you can do with your time than policing decorum. Let the flag/voting feature work as intended and leave yourself out of it. You’re not an impartial person as your political bias is clearly evident in many of your post
If only that were possible! You can't imagine how happy I would be.
Alas, the voting and flagging features aren't sufficient to regulate the system. In fact, none of the community and software mechanisms are sufficient on their own. There needs to be human intervention to jig the system out of its failure modes. Without that, the forum would destroy itself—that is, it would rapidly regress to the internet mean, which means HN wouldn't exist anymore—it would be a completely different place, and probably die off pretty quickly.
If it helps at all, I promise you that the moderation comments are even more tedious to write than they are to read.
As for political bias, I have no idea which bias you think I/we have because we routinely get accused of literally every political bias that exists. People have these perceptions because they grossly overestimate the significance of the moderation calls they dislike, while barely noticing the ones they agree with. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Gulf of Tonkin, Iraq WMDs, Syria chemical weapons false flag, Hunter Biden's laptop, FBI setting up the mentally deficient to create terrorists, to name a few.
