Foreign state actors?

We have government agents frequenting this website to sew anti-US sentiment? Really?

Could you identify some of them? Or at least one or two of the obvious ones?

> (That's a common English idiom meaning "not paying attention," for the foreign state actors out there.)

It's even worse than "not paying attention". It's knowing the truth of the situation and actively avoiding acknowledging it to yourself or anyone else. Hiding your head in the sand and shouting "It's not really happening, it's not really happening!" despite knowing that it is indeed happening.

Names or evidence. Either will do.

I don't want to

Don't make insinuations you aren't willing to back with evidence. We've had guidelines against this for years, precisely because these claims make for such repetitive and empty discussion, and this subthread is a perfect specimen of that. Any time anyone provides us with evidence of manipulation of the site, we investigate it and take action.

We – of course – care about manipulation on HN; the only reason this is a site people come to for discussing so many different important topics is that so much effort has gone into ensuring integrity in the content that can be read here. It's just not that easy to engage in astroturfing, shilling, brigading, etc without setting off alarms either in the software or in the many HN users who have finely honed bullshit detectors, because organized, manipulative participation looks and feels so clearly different from earnest participation.

We are monitoring for manipulation all the time; we're highly motivated to do so, because the fastest path to the decline of HN is the one where people lose trust in it. Thus every one of our moderation decisions begins with community trust. People who care about the health of HN point out evidence of manipulation when they see it. Commenting like yours is a form of trolling.