zlacker

I did notice it the past that HN articles critical of China behaved in a strange way. In the past all the comments in the comment section were downvoted, sometimes you could see dozens of comments greyed out, every single one of them. (Probably because it's not possible to downvote an article). Now the articles are flagged, probably whoever was organising this realised that flagging an article is effectively downvoting it.

>>0-_-0+(OP)
No one is organizing anything. It is all just community + software + moderation interacting normally. People read sinister "organization" into it purely because of their pre-existing conceptions. It's a big Rohrschach test and nothing more.

I say that based on looking into literally thousands of such cases, and spending god knows how many hours poring over data. My comments are based exclusively on what I know about HN—I know nothing at all about other sites because I don't have their data. But I know a lot about HN, and I can tell you that the users making breathless insinuations about this stuff have literally no idea what they're talking about. The truth is just painfully boring. (Edit: here's a detailed explanation - >>27397230 .)

As for why the comments in such threads get downvoted, that is easily explained by the fact that flamewar topics attract shitty comments, and shitty comments get shittier as people get politically and nationalistically riled.

>>0-_-0+(OP)
I've downvoted everyone in an entire thread before. Not because I'm a member of a shadowy organization (otherwise I'd be blowing my cover posting this) but because all of them were really bad. HN being HN, usually someone will take the time to write a good comment, but especially on emotionally charged topics, the earliest comments will be both short and just a reflection of the posters views before they read the article (if they read it at all) which makes it likely I'll consider them downvote-worthy.

I think there are probably quite a few users who behave similarly. But there's no need for us to form an organization, because each of us can just use the user-moderation tools as intended, without having to coordinate our actions with each other.

>>dang+I3
> It's a big Rohrschach test and nothing more.

This is a really insightful way of describing this phenomenon.