Comment by fwipsy
5 days ago
Funny that you should mention a Reddit-originated conspiracy theory on an article about how Reddit is deteriorating as a source of information. I found this blog post: https://coagulopath.com/ghislaine-maxwell-does-not-have-a-se... which appears to conclusively refute the main evidence above, but I haven't independently verified. If you have stronger evidence than what appears to be copy-pasted AI output, I will re-evaluate.
Your link actually don't touch upon what I found most compelling: That /u/maxwellhill stopped positing two days before her arrest and haven't posted again since then.
> If this was true, it would be the strongest piece of evidence so far.
> But it’s not.
> I’m sorry to tell you this, but /u/maxwellhill did post after the 2nd of July. Just not in public. He continued to perform moderator duties, interact with staff members, and answer private messages. Here’s a conversation between /u/hasharin and /u/maxwellhill that happened on the 9th.
> Additionally, here’s evidence that /u/maxwellhill made a post inside a private subreddit, nine days after the “Tr45son” one.
> This seems pretty bad for the theory. With Ghislaine Maxwell in jail awaiting charges, /u/maxwellhill is casually swapping PMs with reddit moderators and spitballing around policy ideas. How could they be the same person?
That's from the link.
I stopped posting to Reddit in December 2015 and haven't been back since. David Bowie died a few days later 10 January 2016. Am I David Bowie?
I've gotta wonder how often this happens in the general case: a prolific user and mod of large subreddits stops posting abruptly without notice. How many users are as active as maxwellhill was with similar seniority? Maybe a few thousand? In a given year, how many of them abandon Reddit suddenly? It seems like some scraping and basic analytics could yield an answer, and then we'd know the posterior.
Don't know if maxwellhill was ghislaine, but whoever he was, I think some big life event caused him to leave, and that it wasn't voluntary.
Except it does
Thanks. It wasn’t AI btw. I found this interesting comment analyzing the article you shared https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29898523 (it’s also curious that your article speculates about Maxwell’s innocence in taking part in abusing children herself but that’s not directly relevant)
I apologize for accusing you of pasting AI output; I still would have preferred that you edited it down to a more manageable length.
The probability calculation apparently assumes that Ghislaine Maxwell has a Reddit account. Reddit had only about a million users in 2006. There were about a billion people with Internet access in 2006, so the chances of a given Internet user being on Reddit in 2006 are about 1 in 1000.
Regarding stylometry, I agree that the account reads as British (and the user admits that he's worked in the UK during an AMA) but it also reads to me as male, and not in a way that seems affected.
It seems to me that the whole argument basically hinges on /u/hasharin's screenshots being faked. I agree it wouldn't be hard to perfectly counterfeit Reddit screenshots, but it still seems more likely that they're real to me.
Overall I would give maybe 1 in 4 odds on it being true. Fortunately nothing of importance (to me) hinges on finding out the truth about this :)
> article speculates about Maxwell’s innocence
Where does it do that? I don't see it.