I don't like the mob thing either but it's how large group dynamics on the internet work (by default). We try to mitigate it where we can but there's not a lot of knowledge about how to do that.
Are there people whose upvotes count for more than others? Or are these actively suppressed? Either way, it makes it hard to have important/robust conversations when the people seeing them gets suppressed
Re the second bit: there aren't any accounts whose upvotes count for more, but if accounts upvote too many bad* comments and/or get involved in voting rings, we sometimes make their votes not count anymore.
* By "bad" I mean bad relative to HN's intended purpose as defined here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Relative to that, "bad" means snark, flamewar, ideological battle, etc. — all the things that zap intellectual curiosity.
In terms of moderator action: we might downweight ChatGPT topics (for oar against) if they seem repetitive rather than significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). But we don't downweight posts that are critical of YC companies—or rather, we do so less than we would downweight similar threads on other topics. See https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....