Nafarious "influencers" and bad actors on HN?

> purposeful distracting comments,

The voting system invites this by its very nature. People will try and post early attention grabbing comments that are vaguely related to the story in order to get lots of upvotes.

Plenty of good potential conversations are derailed by, not flame bait (obvious flame bait gets deleted), but, "very engaging" conversations that start off on some tangent that is only the slightly bit related to the story.

The people who focus on the negative aspects of social media will be less satisfied than the people who focus on the value granted. Especially considering your relative lack of power to change how others engage on this platform, you’ll find a lot more value here in ignoring the voices you don’t like than you will fruitlessly trying to silence them.

Also reconsider the belief that HN is “special”. It likely isn’t.

> > to what extent are there entities that manipulate the arc of the HN narrative(s) via down vote, purposeful distracting comments, and so on? How often does this happen? If not at all, how can that be?

If that happens and it's ideological then how is that not fair and square? It's just a bunch of people who are particularly ideological about something, it happens.

The worry becomes if they are paid to comment and upvote/downvote, that's a whole different matter, but it's hard to prove, but I also suspect it's very hard to conduct such campaign especially on an obscure site like HN.

> "to what extent are there entities that manipulate the arc of the HN narrative(s)"

I may have encountered that a few years ago, someone had submitted a link about progress in medical ultrasounds.

Another person claimed in many long posts that "never, never there will be portable ultrasounds".

Clearly now they are wrong, but even at the time there were PoC of ultraportable ultrasounds.

The guy knew its stuff, so I suppose he/she was working in the industry, and he/she saw the thread as a menace for their business.

I've asked dang et al to release data on astroturfed threads and haven't heard any response whatsoever. They have the data but aren't willing to share it seems. Why is a different question. As persona management (sockpuppetry) tech gets better it becomes much more difficult even with the data to prove.

Who created your frame-of-reference?

Imagine there was a person of relevant credentials who said the climate or covid wasn't all that bad -- he wouldn't be censored by the mods; the article would be flag-killed by those who find it beyond the realm of possibility and/or acceptable discourse.

hn even has its tech blind spots: crypto and LLMs among others, route around them as institutional reform is not possible.

Some sites are banned here, but you can visit them in another tab.

I think that's why everything is on tiktok or discord now, gen-Z aren't trying to reform facebook, they are just routing around established tech, from what I understand tech discord groups routinely mock hn, but I'm not invited to those spaces so this is secondhand.

Because you're asking: we cannot downvote submissions but if I could I would downvote this one. Not because I'm "manipulating the arch of narrative" but because it is a low effort post, pretty much designed to attract conspiratorial comments and commentators who feel silenced/persecuted by downvotes or moderation. That's unlikely to result in a constructive, interesting discussion.