[greenyoda]

I'm not sure why someone would go to great lengths to manipulate HN regarding something like a bad quarterly report or a corruption scandal. HN is not really a significant news source if you're interested in financial or political news, so keeping it off HN's front page won't make any difference - how many people are there whose only news source is HN?

Another way of thinking about it is that HN is a news aggregator, so any article on HN has already been published somewhere that probably has a much higher readership than HN (mainstream media, tech media, etc.). So why bother to manipulate HN?

That said, it's clear that there are articles posted here that have political, social or commercial agendas behind them, so one has to read skeptically (as is true for all media sources).