Tell Hacker News: Throwaway accounts
Those users are: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ScottHanson, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=SkylerNovak, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=RobertHenderson, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Huxley78, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Nerdlinger, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Dino, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=AVC, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Haggen, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=KeshRivya, http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=KimStarr, and http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=HugotheMongoose.
I wanted to be absolutely certain of this before making the accusation. I'm dead certain of these names, for the following reasons:
1) They follow similar patterns. Either they are very old, inactive user names, or they are extremely new. They all make small comments in other threads that, while not contributing anything useful, are upvoted slightly - to the point where they can upvote other account names.
2) Each one has a similar, one-sided look at Ayn Rand. They all react with very immediate hostility and none of them stop to make decent arguments.
3) Every single one gets incredibly hostile towards people who claim that the article KrisZolar submitted is a poorly-written article. (That article, for the record, took a similar approach to debunking Rand.)
4) They respond to one another's comments, always in the affirmative. When discussing with other people, they each respond in turn, rarely starting a long back-and-forth discussion, and their comments are all upvoted similarly to their original comments: up one or two points in thin trickles, after they've been downvoted. This despite a lack of content.
5) Several of them have deleted their posts after being responded to.
6) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360063 is a comment thread in which Nerdlinger, who has not been a part of the ongoing thread, responds in the defensive as if he has been here for a while.
7) Similarities in the way that they speak and the way in which they use grammar.
8) If you open each of these accounts at once, you see a pattern in their posts: each posts one or two at a time, in a cycle, never simultaneously. There are gaps between their posts in which none of them speak whatsoever.
I flagged their posts, but I don't know exactly how to approach this case. I've never seen something like it on Hacker News. Hopefully this is the right protocol.