From all publicly available evidence, Lobste.rs founding had absolutely nothing to do with HN being an “astroturf forum” in 2012, rather the opposite. Strong moderation lacking in communication seems to have been the primary driver, with the creator being shadow banned and ghosted by the HN mods which basically meant Paul Graham at the time.

https://jcs.org/notaweblog/2012/06/13/hellbanned_from_hacker...

https://lobste.rs/about

> Lobste.rs founding had absolutely nothing to do with HN being an “astroturf forum”

It absolutely had everything to do with it. That's the reason lobste.rs is invite only forum. They had a rather big drama there recently as astroturfer still snuck in even through invite only system resulting in increasing of account restrictions on posting etc.

Personally I think their limits are a bit too strict though when you browse hacker news almost every day you can see how that's necessary.

Is that also the reason they launched with a public mod log, tags, and downvote explanations?

The presence of a trivially bypassed invite tree completely invalidates the public, historical reasoning behind the founding from the founder themself in 2012?

Feel free to open those links I posted before replying.

That's the first I've heard of this. I'd be interested to read more. Do you have any sources to back up the claim that HN is a well known astroturth forum.

I can confirm I've personally been asked to post things on HN because I have an old account and so it would look more organic (I did not, not saying who asked because I'm not interested in starting a brouhaha).

my account is a year older than yours and I've never been asked by shadowy interest groups to astroturf, do you have any tips to improve my account's brand appeal?

Probably a combination of chance, ease of contact, and working for a large tech company thus signaling general obedience. It's not like it happens all the time, only happened once.

I presume you notified DanG. What did he say/do?

I wouldn't say well known, but it is reasonable to assume that some entities would have interest in swaying the HN community enough to put some effort into it. Yesterday for example the thread "Show HN: Twingate – A modern solution for remote access"[1] showed some signs of astroturfing as pointed out in the comment by crmrc114. Possibly as a form of advertising.

Response was very quick as I have usually seen though.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23326755

I think you're looking for https://lobste.rs/