I've spent countless hours poring over data and working on HN's anti-abuse systems—easily an order of magnitude more than everybody else put together who's worked on those things at HN. I've also banned many accounts for doing astroturfing and related abuses on HN. I can tell you that the only insult to intelligence here is when people imagine sinister scenarios out of a few data points and rush to comment threads to complain darkly and accuse others. Randomness plus cognitive bias equals narrative, and when that combines with internet memes like astroturfers-under-every-bed, the result is equal parts poisonous and stupid, which is why we don't allow it here. The overwhelming majority of these insinuations are pure projection. People simply make this shit up when they see something they don't like. It seems related to something hard-wired.

Edit: by the way, it occurs to me that one of the things you said ought to be publicly verifiable: "just look at the comment history on those accounts -- all inactive/active at around the same time". If so—which accounts? If you didn't simply make this up, it should be easy enough to point to which comments and accounts match this claim, from around the time you posted it. If I'm wrong, I'd be happy to admit the mistake and correct it.

Just to be clear, no one is denigrating your good work holding this community together, it's not an easy job, granted, and we appreciate the time it takes to do so.

There are also no "dark thoughts" or sinister plots at play here. I was simply replying to OP who posed the curious question about how this thread evolved so quickly, and I as the cat, got killed.

However, we should both know by now that "anti-abuse" and AI/Algos only get you so far, we still need human moderation, and that was what I was doing -- using my brain to see patterns xD

I don't know what you want me to prove here, I don't have the data, I don't have timeseries metadata of posts or IPs etc. -- but it shouldn't take a genius to pick out at least a dozen early comments that had no comment history for >30 days and then all decided to comment at the same time on the same thread. Couple that with a thread subject that didn't really have anything of value (read: promotional) and it's quick rise to the #2 spot -- the conclusion I came to was that it was being brigaded/spammed/seeded/call-it-what-you-want.

This was all that I was trying pointing out, sorry if wasn't appropriate.