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Comment by ericol | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that's the case. If you browse HN somewhat regularly, you'll see that a lot of times when a post makes it to the top (Or close enough) it's very likely that a related post will make the rounds pretty soon.

I think it's more related to people trying to ride the karma wave than "A coordinated takedown of ad tech companies". And it is effective, because it happens way too often.

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Yes, this was just a standard follow-up [1] and we did the standard counter-follow-up, which is to merge the threads.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=follow-up%20by%3Adang&dateRang...

Hi dang, I'm wondering is there a list of HN phenomena that you've noticed over the years?

Examples would be:

1. follow-up submissions

2. an initial wave of critical comments followed by a wave of apologist comments

3. first page of comments occupied by a single top level comment with lots of descendants (you often post to draw attention to other pages of comments in these cases)

There's no systematic list but I use links to HN Search (like in the GP) to refer to such patterns. There must be a hundred such categories by now. Eventually I may try to compile them into something more standardized.

I agree, I remember reading an article or a comment explaining this phenomenon on HN, with examples.

Nevertheless it would be interesting if the idea of digital ads being ineffective snowballed to the point where it became like a self-fulfilling prophecy, and led to the demise of large companies that we think of as "giants" or "monopolies".

Or a coordinated "strike" by major ad spenders.

I'll bet that a lot of ad spend is zero sum. They'd probably rather share profits than boost google's.

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