Internet users generally are too quick to reach for sinister/nefarious explanations of phenomena that have mundane/boring reasons, so I lean more towards that interpretation, but I really don't know.
I would think HN to be a much smaller/niche community than say reddit or twitter in terms of users/monetisation etc, so there’s likely more efforts to manipulate content there. I have myself seen that on niche subreddits for example where bot activity is very obvious - like a 1 hour old post with more upvotes than the top post of that month. To a lesser extent it’s also visible in probably a hundred different ways on reddit (out of which I know a few, and the r/bothunters sub likely knows many more). Thanks for being a human moderator in the middle of all this!
That you haven't seen much evidence of a change is actually really nice to hear and a bit surprising. Since HN has grown in popularity in recent years, I would have expected collusion to show up as a noticeable change in behavior. The motivation and potential reward for brigading seems like it would increase with HN's influence on the tech community.
Also, thanks for responding and providing your insights!
I assumed that brigading had increased. This is mostly due to seeing things go from unflagged to flagged in the amount of time it took me to read the article. I've been a many-times-a-day reader for about 12 years now, and I hadn't really encountered that until recently. But, after reading about MOTs, those seem like a playable reason too