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Comment by soheil | Hacker News Reader

I think a topic can be extremely sensitive and still be discussed on HN as long as it fits a certain accepted narrative. The worry is this asymmetry.

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> I think a topic can be extremely sensitive and still be discussed on HN

I don't agree. All it takes is 4 people to downvote and flag you and you're dead

Enough consecutive downvotes to make the score to go to -4.

I didn't realize this but it would be easy to get around with alt accounts

I assume that the HN mod team (or maybe just dang) can find out if you are doing this. The HN submission algorithm is very sensitive to small numbers of upvotes early on in a submission's life. Using a few alt accounts to boost your posts would have an outsized effect here.

Not sure why only a few alt accounts instead of perhaps thousands would be used by someone who would want to influence what topics get discussed and what don't. Also not difficult to use a reverse exponential decay function to modulate votes.

How does one get a few thousand accounts with more than the karma limit needed to be able to downvote?

Auto submit tech news articles periodiclly?

I think they look for cliques in the graph of people who upvote certain content. Even with "natural" vote times, you may get caught doing this over and over.

This is one of the ways that Reddit and Twitter search for bots too.

I mean we have super sophisticated botnets causing havoc on major/state-linked social media platforms, I think they can handle HN.

you dont need botnet that much, when most of member of a group you belong are conditionned to react (in a pavlov way) to specific trigger.

Social engineering at it's finest.

While others can vouch for you to resurrect you from death

That's never happened to me. Once I'm dead I'm dead. I sometimes get my satisfaction later on, for example when Bitcoin was popular on HN I was one of the few people early on to call it a waste of electricity. Now that's not so controversial.

But the vouch button does exist, I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't work for vast majority of dead comments, since they probably wouldn't be dead in the first place if enough people upvoted them.

I guess I don't have enough karma to have a vouch link. The comment by bombcar in this thread is dead and there's no vouch on it.

I think you need to click on the comment timestamp to view the comment in isolation for "vouch" to appear.

Ok, now I see it. Thanks, learn something new every day

Vouching does rely on someone to take the extra effort relative to a downvote, so I think it's safe to assume vouching is more rare.

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