[josephorjoe]

> Bot armies don't work on Hacker News, but false flagging does. My assumption is that the threshold for taking action is low enough to be reached by an innocent-looking number of brigaded complaints.

I think it is this plus I believe hacker news penalizes 'controversial' discussions, so by ensuring that there are a large number of 'controversial' comments the trolls can kill off discussions they want suppressed.

[Applejinx]

It's their hard luck that to a crowd of curious and intelligent hackers and nerds in the silicon valley and social media programming space, all this is FASCINATING :)

I think in many places it'd be possible to get a whole righteous indignation going that could be exploited against itself, but this is Hacker News. We are nerds and super-interested in exactly this sort of thing, to the point that there are rules against obsessively hyper-focussing on it.

And so when you try to judo-flip the system, nerds immediately notice the discrepancies, and fixate upon them. And nerds can't always be depended upon to fire up righteous outrage and paint themselves the aggressors: the peculiar detachment of the nerd mind comes into play and the reflexive (exploitable) responses can't always be exploited.

Mask-slips like the handling of this article are FASCINATING. It reveals a system behind the story, and the idea that the system pops up in all sorts of places (and has predictable behaviors) is like a puzzle to be solved :)