Oh wow, i always had that gut feeling, but now i know. Stop killing games went from consistent rank 2 to 102 in an instant. And it all happend outside my timezone so i didnt even know it existed here.

HN’s moderation system (posts with lots of flagged comments get derated) seems to really easy to game. Don’t like a story? Have bots post a bunch of inflammatory comments likely to get flagged and it will go away. There’s no way the people who run the site don’t know this, so I don’t know how to possibly make the case that they are actually okay with it.

I believe usually when this happens the admins like dang and tomhow manually unflag the post if they think it's relevant. Which... is not a perfect system, but it works. I've seen plenty of posts be flagged, dead, then get unflagged and revived. They'll go in and manually flag comments, too, to get the conversation back on track. So, I think site admins are aware that this is happening.

Also, it's somewhat easy to tell who is a bot. Really new accounts are colored green. I'm sure there's also long-running bots, and I'm not sure how you would find those.

Jesus Christ. That is a massive correction. I fear most of those EU petition numbers are probably bots, designed to sabotage it.