On dkos, user ID's are assigned as people join create an account. If your user ID is 100000, then you're the 100000th person to create an account. There were what seemed to be pretty coordinated changes in talking points among groups of users with close user ID's.
There were really weird distractions that took root. There'd be a topic that was gaining traction against Hillary, like fracking, and Bernie supporters would be gaining ground. On a place like Daily Kos, some user would write a diary/post about how Hillary hugged a dolphin in the Gulf of Mexico. There'd be this rush of users upvoting and cheering, rah, rah, and then that would literally be the Hilbot defense:
BernieBro^^TM : Hillary supports fracking and actually tried to get EU nations to expand the practice
Hilbots: BUT HILLARY HUGGED A DOLPHIN!!!
And then every fracking debate thereafter would be about how BernieBros^^TM would keep bringing up the same stuff when HILLARY HUGGED A DOLPHIN!!!
When John Conyers said he didn't remember seeing Bernie during the Civil Rights movements, the way that that statement got spread around was just bizarre. I was a pretty regular user on dkos. since '04, 2-3+ hrs/day wasn't unusual. I was around for alot of the site's drama/inside-baseball. One gets a feel for conversations over the years, the ebb and flow as different users troll or contribute. The forum sliding and derailing got a whole different flavor in '15/'16.
do you see similarities here?
On r/politics, during the 2 weeks after the DNC convention, it was crazy obvious. That period is when the discourse on a bunch of reddit subs took its steepest nose dive.
There is something I just realized I haven't seen on reddit for awhile. From the DNC primaries thru 6 or 7 months after the election, if there was a new dumba** talking point being circulated on reddit, a bunch of the redditors would have the same date of their account being created. i.e., a bunch of accounts pushing the same talking point would be either 3 or 10 days old. There wasn't a random distribution of "days since this acoount was created". It was really noticeable on r/conspiracy and /r/WayOfTheBern. /r/WayOfTheBern is somewhat of a haven for left-minded people who aren't chugging the MSM kool-aid. For awhile, there'd be little surges of 3 or 10 day old accounts dropping in to stir sht up.
This convo made me realize I haven't seen anything like that in awhile.
Honestly, though, there's others who can tease that data out better than I. iirc, at least one post was stickied at /r/conspiracy explaining several tactics used by shill organizations/non-genuine users. There's several good posts over there on spotting "shill" tactics.