[79d697i6fdif]

Tagging along on the top reply here, but does anyone else notice some serious HN gaming going on in this thread?

Accounts commenting that have made 10 comments in 5 years, people defending CF that, after going through their profiles, are clearly linked to CloudFlare or maybe even employees. Top relies suddenly being near the bottom and replaced by posts supporting CloudFlare with statements that don't match what was actually in the blog post.

Just seems really really fishy to me

[dang]

> Tagging along on the top reply here

First, no, please don't do that. It's one of the worst patterns in active discussions.

Second, if anyone thinks they see gaming or abuse, they should let us know right away at [e-mail] so we can investigate. Please don't post about it in comments, for a couple reasons: (1) if there really is abuse going on, we need to know, and we don't see most comments; (2) most of us internet readers are orders of magnitude too quick to interpret our own cognitive biases as abuse by others (e.g. X seems obvious to me so anyone arguing ~X must be a shill). This places the threshold for useless, nasty arguments ('you're a shill. no, you're the shill') dangerously low. Combine that with the evil catnip power of all things meta and you get the most malignant strain of offtopicness there is, so we all have to be careful with it. And yes, genuine abuse does also exist. It's complicated that way.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13767122 and marked it off-topic.

[79d697i6fdif]

:( My bad.

[komali2]

I doubt anything more nefarious is happening than a flood of CF employees hitting the thread. Is that gaming?

[JumpCrisscross]

It's, at the very least, disingenuous.

[SilasX]

It's not gaming for a CF employee to offer the own insights, but it would be if they're doing it as part of a coordinated effort. Also, they should be upfront about the affiliation.

[dahdum]

I'm defending them because they're an incredible value for the $200/month we pay them, they've handled it responsibly, and the real impact looks vanishingly small.

[prdonahue]

This is rich coming from an anonymous account created 69 days ago with 17 total comments (and 7 of them in this post).

[79d697i6fdif]

Hey at least mine is an obvious throwaway. And I don't think 17 comments in two months is that bad compared to ten in 5 years

[user5994461]

Let's not assume that accounts are thownaway just because they are made up of random characters ;)

[uladzislau]

HN is very clearly gamed and I see more and more of this, not only in this thread.

[dang]

We take this problem seriously and have years of experience with it. In our experience, "very clearly gamed" nearly always reduces to "seems to me, based on personal biases and incomplete information". When abuse really is going on, that's extremely important, but it is certainly fewer than 10%, probably fewer than 5%, and maybe fewer than 1% of the times we hear this. So we actually have two problems, unfortunately intertwined: (1) abuse and (2) this tendency to imagine it.

For this reason, please don't post unsubstantive allegations to HN. If you have evidence, or significant suspicious, email them to [e-mail] instead.