[changchuming]

Perhaps there are a lot of Chinese citizens overseas who name their accounts the same way? Use your imagination for a little bit. Not everyone who disagrees with you is a troll. There are people who grew up in different environments and have very different worldviews.

[BubRoss]

That's entirely possible, which is why I brought up all the other points of naming patterns, histories that are almost all deflections of Chinese criticism and no other participation, multiple downvotes on multiple comments within the same few minutes when the general trend is in the other direction, etc.

These are all hallmarks of disinformation campaigns from other groups and the same patterns happen on other sites. I think that is worth a discussion. A moderator jumping in to say it's 'poisonous' to point this out while giving no information to support that is pretty disgusting.

[dang]

I've given you this information to support it: nearly every time we investigated these claims, which are legion, we find nothing but the accuser's imagination. This pattern is overwhelming, which is why we've written that guideline the way we have.

If you're worried about abuse, you should be doing what the guidelines ask and email [e-mail] instead of posting off-topic and destructive insinuations in the thread, where the odds are we won't even see them. We don't come close to reading everything here. I looked at some of the accounts with similar names and didn't find anything. That doesn't mean I looked at everything you saw; I probably didn't. If you want your concerns taken seriously, we're happy to look into specific links that you send. Occasionally we do find evidence of abuse, and in such cases we crack down hard. But we need you to follow the site guidelines, and not react to our requests to stop breaking them by breaking them further.

It is indeed poisonous to accuse other users of posting in bad faith, merely because their views seem preposterous to you. Users accusing other users of astroturfing, shilling, meddling, propaganda-ing, foreign-agenting, spying and so on is the most common internet trope there is right now. It's painfully clear that almost all of that is simply made up, and obviously we can't have HN discussions degenerating to that level.

The only approach to dealing with abuse that makes sense is to look for actual evidence. Someone else having an opposing view, even a completely wrong view, isn't evidence of abuse. It's just evidence that people have different views on divisive topics. As for "voting happening in bursts", "hallmarks of disinformation campaigns", and so on, all that kind of thing is notoriously in the eye of the beholder. People mostly see whatever they've primed themselves to see, and that is a function of how strongly they feel about their views: the ones who feel most passionately about a topic are inevitably the ones who see the most convincing 'patterns'. Still, if you're concerned about it, you're welcome to email [e-mail] with specific links and we'll look into them. We always do. Just please follow the site guidelines from now on.

I've posted about this countless times, and anyone who wants more explanation can consume arbitrarily much of it here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...