I don't want to be a tinfoil hatter here, but I think certain industries have a lot more influence over this site than most people realize.
It must have been on page 1 for a while to rack up that many points, then it sank almost immediately to page 5 where all the other posts with even 50+ points were days old. I've always wondered what happened there. Was it the algorithm, or did a mod step in?
It seems very difficult for some people to imagine that their passions aren’t universal, or that people might be tired of endless “awareness raising” campaigns shoehorned into every digital space.
(*examples include 'right-to-repair, Louis Rossman, all the John Deere and phone hackers, general "I want to own the shit I buy". You get the idea.)
For me (and I'm not claiming my opinion is any more than a probable "No true HN person" fallacy), people who never or extremely rarely comment are spectators. And while they quite likely outnumber people who comment regularly by 100 or 1000 to one or more, they are not part of "the HN community" because they do not participate in it.
I think most people's (including spectators) "sense of who the average HN person is" probably aligns reasonably well with the average HN _participant_.
As a rule of thumb, promoting an agenda (and that's what a petition is) tends to be toward the less intellectually interesting end of the spectrum...occasionally promoting an agenda might involve interesting arguments.
A petition is not much of an argument. A petition is a call to action that requires very little action and typically minimal commitment.
By which I mean, I might have flagged it if I saw it on the front page. And maybe I did.
I don't like Paul Graham, but I don't know if he really gives a shit what's happening on here. HN is not a super influential forum.
Yes, exactly. That's why it struck me as being so weird; something so innocuous on its face getting hammered that badly suggests some kind of outside coordinated influence.
(oh, and edit; apparently industry lobbyists had been holding private counter-op meetings with the EU Commission before said petition was even finished, so there's that. Not immediately relevant to this discussion but it does speak to what goes on behind the curtain in government topics)
That seems like circular logic? Hasn't dang offered many reasons why a post might be suddenly down rated?
There's just got to be more than "I think I saw a post get down rated, so it must be a bot army"
The SDV/SKG petition thing was none of those, and people were generally positive about it during the discussion. So it seems to me it was either an unexplained random down-voting event or something a little more malicious.
And also, look how good Graphene OS posts do, and now compare that to Stop Killing Games. These both have a similar overlap (unless you work at Google, both are interests/hobbies), yet GOS almost always hits front page (and rightly so), yet SKG failed to, despite being a Stallman-ian topic.