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Comment by kfkdkfkfn | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many Facebook employees are lurking on hacker new, ready to downvote people that speak badly of facebook. I once had a comment on Facebook that got flagged that ended up with a ton of upvotes after it was clear it a genuine comment.

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An important thing to note is that whether facebook has employees doing this or not, there's no shortage of services for hire that will do this for anyone.

Literally any social media site that's popular is guaranteed to have accounts whose influence is for sale.

While this is true, just for a second consider on which side the groupthink in these comments falls. The mentality that anyone who disagrees with you must be "brigading" or a paid shill is very dangerous. It's also a consistent sign of the lowest quality debate on both sides --- everyone thinks everyone else is a Soros/Mercer/Russian/Clinton shill or bot.

While I agree with your premise, I don’t think it applies in this case. It is good that people are more weary of what they read online. For one, the internet is rarely the source of truth. There are too many bad actors around. Second, if someone disagrees with a comment, they should reply to that comment with another well thought out comment. Downvoted and flagging require no effort and is an emotional reaction more than a logical argument. This can be gamed easily. Upvotes and downvotes are unhelpful in that herd mentality can easily game the system. Flagging people’s genuine comment is bad faith and has nothing to do with disagreement.

>that got flagged that ended up with a ton of upvotes after it was clear it a genuine comment.

That happened to me too!

I'm happy that HN has the flagging feature, but I suspect that feature is being abused in an organized way by rings to hide comments that run counter to certain vested interests.

It's quite remarkable how quickly certain topics on here are reduced to a sea of light grey comments. Not always the ones you might expect either.

Can you point to just one of those that consists of high quality downvoted comments? Certain topics seem to attract lower quality comments. I don't think a conspiracy theory is needed. I rarely see flagged comments that don't deserve it, although sometimes I vouch for flagged comments when I can't tell why they were flagged. Often they weren't even downvoted at all. Never seems to be the kind of comment or topic that makes me suspicious of a conspiracy/foul play though.

Many probably - and when they downvote critical comments they probabaly secretly know they might be supporting something unethical.

And if my comment - which will obviously be downvoted - changes the perception of only one single Facebook employee, then it was worth the downvotes!

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