If it's going on, it's probably not in the threads that I read.

Hacker News has no ads: It has to support someone's agenda, otherwise it would be a charity.

I see sock puppets everywhere. Some obviously state actors. This is how soft power is exercised in the 21st century to shape narrative. Your tax dollars being spent (assuming you live in a country that practices propaganda against it's own citizens like the USA. see Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012/2013)

Difference is in scale, not in kind. BBS's, Chan honeypots, chat control, dark network infiltration, MSM/FAANG & governmental manipulation are all just different ways of trying to coerce and orient different maturities and scales of technical networks. The implementation details and scale may differ, but the actors, activities, and mechanics are all the same. Without a single machine or computer in the picture, these same tactics are the fundamentals of manufacturing consent amongst a gaggle of free agents. If you only have a bunch of humans trying to organize themselves in a network, these same forces will emerge. If you can't see that, that's more a failure on your part, but I still beseech you to really bloody pay attention. It's not about tech. It's about guiding attention and shaping narrative. The tech has just made the activity and execution easier to do, more difficult to investigate, faster to get results, and is absolutely something I will until the end of my days, initiate young men and women to.

Even just members of this forum, through my observation of how they operate over the last decade are prone to the same forces. It isn't alien. Quite the contrary. Most bloody human thing on the planet. People organizing against other people. Tale as old as time. We have the manual. It is in use. It isn't perfect. It can be worked around. But you have to know about it to do it. The first step is learning. The second step, is resistance. There cannot be the second without the first.