[shostack]

With regards to politics, wasn't that found to be a Russian active measures tactic where they'd get low quality or inaccurate comments up voted to the top, down vote actual informative comments, and flood their up voted comments with low quality replies and threads to push the informative stuff so low that users likely will give up scrolling before they see it?

[bdowling]

No need for foreign operatives, we do it ourselves.

We treat thumbs up/down as agree/disagree, whether we're supposed to or not.

[piva00]

They just enhance it, the division and polarisation already exist, what Russia has learned is that if they press those buttons hard enough they make our democracies ungovernable.

They aren't causing it, just furthering our issues for their own goals, and unfortunately it's working pretty well.