| > Thank you HN for proving me right You've been proven nothing of the sort. I buried your post and the submission itself while investigating this claim, even though you've been trolling HN threads with these rants for weeks now, using multiple accounts to do it, ignoring our requests to stop breaking the site guidelines, and barraging us with ranty emails to boot. I've looked closely at the data and found no evidence for any of this. Every sentence in your comment is either demonstrably false or completely unsupported. I know that sometimes a bee gets into one's bonnet, but as I've explained to you a dozen times or so, all we can do is look at the data, and if reality conflicts with what you're saying, we have to go with reality. Actually, I appreciate your underlying concern for the integrity of this site. (Not so much the smears and accusations of corruption.) Your real sin, though, is wasting our time. That sucks precious resources away from doing what we ought to be doing to make HN better. I haven't had a chance to attend to the front page for the last several hours because I've been busy looking into this, writing about it, and dealing with your posts and emails. Meanwhile other emails pointing out quality concerns in other threads have been piling up in the inbox. Even though it's tedious, I've assembled a sample of what you've been posting so that readers can evaluate your claims for themselves, and also see how much damage a single disgruntled user can do to this place. In the future, we can refer concerns back here and hopefully not lose so much time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22465402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22645796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22587268 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22646808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22223423 This was a pleasant one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22652042 In the past, you've had similar campaigns against other sites and topics, including Go, Kubernetes, IndieHackers, Keybase, DuckDuckGo, Mailchimp, and (yes) the Qataris: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22361860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22329624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22190633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22211243 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22109987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22048852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22112625 |
You can check a lot of this for yourself using publicly available information.
Look at a sample of users who've been expressing interest about Tailscale, in threads about that topic and/or Wireguard or other topics. Check out the histories of these users—you can do that by clicking on a username to go to their profile, and then clicking on 'comments' or 'submissions'. You'll see that most are longstanding, serious community members. If your random samples look anything like the ones I've examined, you'll find many excellent HN contributors among them, with a lot of technical expertise. This is evidence that the interest in this topic is both organic and serious. I'd supply links, but it wouldn't feel right to haul in specific usernames that way. It's easy enough to check.
To that public information, I can add some non-public facts. First, the profiles of users upvoting these threads look much the same as the commenters. Of course in many cases they are the same, since it's natural to both upvote and comment on something that you find interesting. In addition, the voting patterns on these threads look like what we see on popular topics of organic interest, and nothing like what we tend to see with voting rings and organized promotion.
Conclusion: although we can never say for sure, because we aren't inside users' heads while they upvote, the evidence points to organic interest. I'll go further: I'm the person who has spent by far the most time on this problem in the history of HN and I find it hard to imagine the evidence being any clearer. Also, no one at HN (and no one at YC that I know of) has any connection with any of the people involved in this project. I've spent so much time writing about this because (a) I don't like to see people smeared, (b) we take concerns about abuse of HN extremely seriously, and (c) I want a record to link back to in the future so I don't have to spend any more sad hours on this.