[blunte]

That's the problem though... the post I saw wasn't flag-worthy. It was a bit poor quality in my opinion, but it wasn't objectionable.

What was obvious to me was the frequency of submissions of the account, and additionally nature of the topics.

Simplistically, I would question the need for any HN user to submit more than one or two entries per day. People who submit 10+ are probably suspect.

[hillcrestenigma]

Maybe there needs to be a way to flag a user if they are negatively contributing to HN.

[version_five]

There is. There is banning and shadowbanning, which includes mechanisms where whatever stories someone posts are "dead" on arrival. HN has robust mechanisms against spam. Re "manipulation" I'd think one person's manipulation is another person's posting interesting stories, but as was said, if someone's submissions get flagged enough, it will get attention and their posts will be killed if deemed spam. Overall I think it's more common just to see posts that people disagree with or read into versus actual "manipulation".

Also, the concept of manipulation is very insulting to the readership. Maybe it's sometimes warranted, but on HN of all places, I think people can debate, judge, and flag on their own if they think something is being manipulative.

[blunte]

The suspicion of manipulation is based on years of evidence of "troll farms" and other social media campaigns. To think that HN is immune is naive.

If arguably the smartest tech group on the internet cannot devise a defense, then we're more doomed than I thought. After all, at the opposite end of the spectrum we have "AI" at Google and other companies banning users based on incomprehensible algorithms. Surely there's a path between the extremes.

Consider for a moment how little it would cost to pay people to post on HN. Other HN readers don't even need to see it; it just needs to get indexed by search engines. That adds the weight of HN to the content which it is linking to as far as the search engines are concerned. They probably aren't measuring HN reader votes.

So the question is, should we allow HN to be used as a lever to promote anything that a financially-backed group wants to promote? Or can we devise ways to reduce or eliminate this?

[gtirloni]

Report the bots/spammers to dang and let them deal with it IFF it goes against the guidelines (shadowban, etc).

The kind of thought policing you're proposing will never fly here.

[blunte]

Did you bother to look at the poster's submissions? It's not "thought policing". It is intent-awareness.