[textgel]

It's honestly getting creepy at this point.

Throughout this entire comment tree starting from its base you have multiple long term HN users all consciously going out of their way to constructs lies in the pursuit of defaming this man.

joshuamorton is supposedly a google employee according to his profile and yet was perfectly happy to throw the antisemitism bs around.

There's several accounts down the bottom, each a number of years old and ostensibly regular otherwise; all of which have made efforts to come to this discussion and make up slander. And then of course run when pressed to provide evidence.

And they do all this despite the counter evidence being available to all.

Honestly, what is happening there? Is it some sort of collective insanity? Is it something they all agree needs to be done for some greater good? And if that's the case do they agree to it subconsciously/consciously? Is it all just people who are incredibly susceptible to group pressure and who will go along with any absurdity so long as it's ordered from the right authority.

How do you go about justifying deliberately attempting to hurt a person like this?

Just the sight of it astounds me.

[Chris2048]

It's possible that each of the individuals, rather than act with bad intentions, simply exist in bubbles in which they heard these allegations, and repeated them here without checking them first.

Hopefully, if this is the case, these individuals realise the bubble they exist in, and give such topics more scrutiny in future.

That said @textgel, I find bringing up individual user's details a bit unsavoury; By all means, distinguish between long-term vs short-term users, but I don't think you should bring up employer, even if it's public info.

[textgel]

That's fair; apologies. I'm too late to edit it now but if some passing mods see it and is able to alter please do so.

[the_only_law]

> Honestly, what is happening there?

Despite HN being explicitly not a venue for politics, enough of the userbase has de-facto decided it should be. This of course invites all the sort of internet antics that come with politics which HN users in the past have decried and claimed that the lack of here makes it a more pleasant place in general.

That's when you find these otherwise normal accounts, acting up, accounts that exist solely for flamebating, drive by throwaways attempting to derail threads, etc. And since HN is primarily user-moderated (ironically despite what a subset of the previously described types often insinuate), these sort of behavior can become encouraged if enough people agree the the text or subtext of such comments.

[commandlinefan]

The comment you replied to is actually flagged dead now.

[textgel]

"showdead" is a must for HN