Yes, for example Facebook and TikTok.
> HN is no different in that respect.
Well, Twitter has over 200 million users. I believe that HN is much much smaller. HN also tends to be more anonymous.
I like to think that dang's days consist of monocle and tophat shopping, sabotaging the metric system, and propping up the global media conspiracy.
However, I suspect the root cause is more mundane: Some small percentage of users treat "flag article" like the downvote button.
Does that help?
That's the relevant number. So Twitter is about 1000x larger than HN.
From a surveillance standpoint, we're really only talking about commenters, on both sites.
How so? How many HN comments have "gone viral"? How many news stories are about a HN comment? How many politicians and journalists and pro athletes and Hollywood celebrities are commenting on HN?
Any given HN comment can receive only a theoretical maximum of 250K upvotes, if (improbably) every registered user upvoted it, and those upvotes would be superfluous anyway, because they would only bring the comment to the top of a single HN submission.
Someone with 1mil+ followers is a whole other story. They have enough people watching their every move to cause problems if they are dealt with directly, so they need more attention for implicit handling over time, psychological and financial handling, etc. People with an audience can cause a lot of social, political, and ultimately financial damage to many entities just by some words. And in a world run by marketers, salespeople, lawyers, bankers, and politicians — this is the scariest threat imaginable.
Tech people can do a lot of technical damage but it is mostly just a thorn in the side of the machine. Even if they built something disruptive, an audience is needed for it to go anywhere, and most avenues for scaling anything disruptive are already tightly controlled / monitored by big tech.
I say this as what I believe the controlling authorities perspective is on the matter.