Though still relevant, this is old stuff.
Nowadays many of the largest forums are simply captured, by a dedicated team working to a script with dozens of alts. Once you have complicit moderators, this stuff is lame in comparison.
Once your guy / team has mod control, you can change the entire culture and tone of the forum, as soft or as hard as you like, and ban complainers.
You can make posts invisible to search engines, or remove posts for a couple hours and then put them back once the algorithm is bored of them. You can wipe posts entirely, give no explanation, and wipe the posts that complain.
If you think people wouldn't bother to do this, think again. There's significant amounts of money and political capital involved. What PR company or major political party wouldn't want control of a national subreddit that keeps making corruption and cover-ups hard to control?
Nowadays many of the largest forums are simply captured, by a dedicated team working to a script with dozens of alts. Once you have complicit moderators, this stuff is lame in comparison.
Once your guy / team has mod control, you can change the entire culture and tone of the forum, as soft or as hard as you like, and ban complainers.
You can make posts invisible to search engines, or remove posts for a couple hours and then put them back once the algorithm is bored of them. You can wipe posts entirely, give no explanation, and wipe the posts that complain.
If you think people wouldn't bother to do this, think again. There's significant amounts of money and political capital involved. What PR company or major political party wouldn't want control of a national subreddit that keeps making corruption and cover-ups hard to control?