I suppose it's rather predictable that people can't post something about the CCP on a meta-story about the CCP killing news stories, without their posts in turn being killed.
The same pattern plays out on every divisive topic: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... The truth, as far as I can tell after studying the data closely for years now, is that this is pure cognitive bias. One easy way to see this is to notice how people who like and dislike the opposite things have precisely opposing pictures of the bias they think dominates here.
Somehow people find it difficult to understand how someone else, with a different background, might have a very different view. It feels like it can't possibly be sincere—it must be dishonest and disingenuous, such as communist agents under the hood (or shills being paid to astroturf, or whatever lingo fits the theme). In reality, this is how a non-siloed internet forum works: you encounter others who believe very different things than you do.
If it feels weird or odd, that's because we're good at siloing ourselves into places where we don't rub shoulders with such people with such views. HN isn't like that, because it's the same set of stories and comments for everyone. There are millions of people here, all over the world. If a topic is at all divisive, there's at least a million people who strongly disagree with you about it. That's all you need to explain the comments, votes, and flags you dislike.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
People are not just wildly different in their opinions but also in their demeanor. I used to develop a fairly popular app (GeeTasks), and I had fans in my forums overflowing with enthusiasm for the app and hostility towards an occasional detractor. I would have assumed they were paid to do it, but then I most certainly did not, and I can scarcely imagine that my competitors would.
Having witnessed this first-hand I given up on my formerly impeccable shill-detecting skills.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/12/12/20993665/artificial-in...
What's happening is that you're falling prey to the notice-dislike bias: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
And which posts would that be? I have show-dead on, I see four dead posts, and I struggle to see any substantial criticism of CCP in their rank.
There are four dead comments in this thread.
* Two are entirely unrelated to the article at hand.
* One is a plea to not have this kind of content on Hacker News.
* One is meta-criticism that HN is fragile.
None of them match your criticism.
Which is exactly why the moderators frown upon comments that mope about astroturfing - they add nothing but noise to the discussion. Any weird voting biases will even-out over time. If you suspect astroturfing, send an email to the mods instead of degrading the quality of conversation.
I think I've had a fairly-conclusive watch on this post; the accusations in his post don't reflect reality and haven't.
It takes time for reflective, a.k.a. thoughtful, comments to emerge, especially about the specifics of a story.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Reflexive/generic/superficial comments get downvoted, but not because communist agents are manipulating the threads or because the bulk of the community disagrees. They get downvoted because they're high-indignation-low-information, and tedious. In other words, they're flamebait, which is against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The users who post and upvote such comments, unfortunately, draw exactly the wrong conclusion from this. They take a flying leap into feeling certain that the community (and/or mods) is biased toward the view they dislike and stacked against their own view. They somehow manage not to notice the countless posts that support their positions and are upvoted just fine. Then they start a meta flamewar about the site being clearly biased / obviously infiltrated. That flamewar is even more reflexive, angry, and off topic than the first one.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The quality used to be there. The stories were well researched and more business on-topic than other places like the Wall Street Journal, but now that’s over a decade ago.
Besides this CCP thing, one wonders what else they are watering down. Why would Bloomberg report anything negative about their major customers?
Incidentally, I have seen anti-GOP coverage on Fox and anti-DNC coverage on CNN. Not enough, but a non-zero amount. Maybe the motive is simply to give the false impression of impartiality, I don't know.