My hunch is HN got hit by a couple coordinated and ongoing info ops. I've noticed a couple topics and clusters that automatically gather the same users and a sudden cluster of young low karma accounts. It's not just Israel-Palestine or Iran, but also anything Russia-Ukraine, US elections, or China related.

Despite what the moderators say, their moderation hasn't kept pace with LOTL accounts and other HN account reselling platforms.

At some point this will blow back on YCombinator, especially because my understanding is that YCombinator treats all posts on HN as YC's IP.

That said, I also know two fairly prominent founders who are also fairly active HNers who felt social media activism (especially on HN) would help drive their message. One of them founded a fairly prominent DevOps company.

The silver lining is that HN doesn't actually matter to most people in the industry. It's become an inside joke at my fund to call a pitch or idea "HN worthy". Most younger (below 35) techies don't use HN and most older techies don't either.

Increasingly the mindshare and usage on HN is largely outside of the US, with most activity occuring outside normal US hours (3am-9am PST).

That makes a lot of sense.

It's just weird that a bot or political campaigners would think they would sway opinions with one sentence "Reddit-like" comments, since HN isn't like that normally. Also who actually gets swayed? This green guy who's mic-dropping his comments are surely not swaying anybody.

I just hope the mods start upping the bar somehow. The one line mic drops are what make Reddit fairly high noise and low quality unless you really know what you're searching for.

> Also who actually gets swayed

Exactly.

> I just hope the mods start upping the bar somehow

I'm sure they are trying, but knowing how under-resourced HN is by YCombinator (barely any staff, handful of mods who are only really doing this because of close ties to old school YC, only really surviving because it's PG's baby) I don't think much will change.

I want to keep attending demo day so I won't say more.

So is it coordinated or does no one care about HN? I can’t determine what you’re saying.

If coordinating is cheap enough, you might as well do it whether anyone is listening or not.

I’ve been on HN for longer than most of the accounts on this thread. The issue is that HN doesn’t take kindly to controversial takes (see Michael O’Church fiasco some decade back). So burner accounts are almost a necessity if you want to say anything where someone’s poor feelings might get upset. Called anti semitic? Shit, better let the ADL know then.

I don’t think anyone truly gives a shit about HN enough to have a concentrated attack effort. But Israel, China, Russia, Ukraine and Palestine are all hot topics. Fuck em. Nuke them all from the orbit.

Yeah I'm an old account too, and this is my second account (my original from 2008 ish.) Tend to agree that nobody cares enough about HN for a concentrated attack, but I also could be wrong. It's quite cheap these days to spin up burners and small accounts to coordinate. This became trivial from below-frontier models from last year, let alone today's models.

That being said, there's some real changes happening on this site. I'm not sure if it's just the audience getting old, angry, and jaded or something else entirely. I talk a bit about this in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50225117

This would be an amazing blog post to read, quite frankly. I think I’m only getting the tail end from the stats alone. Thank you for doing this. Looking forward to it.