https://hn.algolia.com/?q=author%3Adang+cracks#!/comment/for...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8157880
This all sounds rather worrying.
Re abuse, you'd have to be more specific about what you mean, but I suppose the general answer is you needn't be more worried about it now than you've been for the previous seven years, since there hasn't been any major change at that level. The major change has been greater transparency, because users asked for it.
Edit: does the escalation algorithm perform batch escalations at fixed times every day, working from a queue of manually approved escalations? Or is the timing and quantity of escalations in each batch also manually approved?
The principle is that we want to do as little manually as possible.