Hacker News Reader

Is the voting system not susceptible to meddling?

Susceptible in theory, infeasible in practice for forums of a large enough size, as there are enough organic votes to counteract shenanigans.

In the case of more low-key manipulation, on Hacker News in particular there's flagging which shuts down shenanigans more effectively if needed.

I strongly suspect that flagging can also be gamed to selectively suppress topics.

I don’t know if it’s happening, and don’t know if I would be enable to tell - by definition…

Flagged posts can be seen with showdead enabled.

Additionally, posts that are incorrectly flagged can be vouched by another user (sometimes; the heuristics are unclear).

It seems fairly easy to automate given the person automating has control of a domain, which is trivial: 001@somedomain.com, 002@somedomain.com, etc.