All I can tell you is that we haven't seen much evidence of it. That could be because more is going on than we know about, or it could be because people are too quick to reach for this explanation.
Internet users generally are too quick to reach for sinister/nefarious explanations of phenomena that have mundane/boring reasons, so I lean more towards that interpretation, but I really don't know.
Thank you, that is understandable, and imo, unsurprising fortunately.
I would think HN to be a much smaller/niche community than say reddit or twitter in terms of users/monetisation etc, so there’s likely more efforts to manipulate content there. I have myself seen that on niche subreddits for example where bot activity is very obvious - like a 1 hour old post with more upvotes than the top post of that month. To a lesser extent it’s also visible in probably a hundred different ways on reddit (out of which I know a few, and the r/bothunters sub likely knows many more). Thanks for being a human moderator in the middle of all this!
(Replying to your latest comment.) I meant 'colluding to flag' by brigading - same as what the other commenter was interested in.
That you haven't seen much evidence of a change is actually really nice to hear and a bit surprising. Since HN has grown in popularity in recent years, I would have expected collusion to show up as a noticeable change in behavior. The motivation and potential reward for brigading seems like it would increase with HN's influence on the tech community.
Also, thanks for responding and providing your insights!
Internet users generally are too quick to reach for sinister/nefarious explanations of phenomena that have mundane/boring reasons, so I lean more towards that interpretation, but I really don't know.