You'll find the people downvoting are mostly not people. It seems to be a naive de-amplification when certain posts have above a threshold of activity, where ne

You'll find the people downvoting are mostly not people. It seems to be a naive de-amplification when certain posts have above a threshold of activity, where negative and neutral sentiment is downvoted. While you need at least 500 karma points to see the downvote mechanism, apparently its been possible to downvote using curl or other software after attaching certain nonces without any kind of verification that the account meets that requirement. A guy interested in this was tinkering and found that out in another post. Not sure if the guy ended up reaching out to dang or not. I didn't go about verifying it, but the post he tinkered in definitely was downvoted by several points and the account used had only single digit karma (almost brand new). As for what happened, its pretty clear that the boss follows the academic and government stereotype of the corrupt magistrate. Leveraging someone who can't say no for fear of reprisal (and she immigrated from such an environment so its fresh). In any case, this is just an example of how totalitarian our society has become, and how it has followed the predictable indicators similar to that which lead up to Hitler's rise to power. There has been a running debate that when communism fails to subvert and seize power, totalitarianism rises in response. A lot of historian's have been working hard lately.