It is the doubt and suspicion thus generated that are really toxic...as it takes one a long time and non-trivial effort in order to concretely verify any eviden

It is the doubt and suspicion thus generated that are really toxic...as it takes one a long time and non-trivial effort in order to concretely verify any evidence of paid shilling -- and before that, for all this long time, we have to doubt and suspect, which would soon make it quite discouraging to have any interesting discussion... We could send emails to hn@ycombinator.com , but the thing is that I don't know how long it would take for us to get any feedback -- as presumably, this is largely a manual investigation on the mod's part; and I don't know how many such emails a mod would receive in a day...and during all this time of waiting for feedback or a possible action, a regular user engaging in a discussion might have to bear all the attacks and gaslighting -- and sometimes the attacker(s) could be quite insidious... For instance, I used to have another new account, which had very little karma points...And after making a few comments for the first time, one of which contained some discussion about the censorship by the Chinese government ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14742211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14742211 ) -- then two of my other comments (relatively neutral and containing nothing about Chinese government or so), which I did not think were aggressive or factually erroneous, soon had been downvoted multiple times. As a result, my karma points dropped sharply, and my account was soon forbidden by the system to make any new comment for some time (basically, it had been DoS'ed)... I still do not know at this time if there was any intentional manipulation behind that case... Well, I could have reported the incident, as a possible malicious DoS attack on my account, to the mod -- but I was also banned by the system at the time and could not continue with the discussion for a while...Or I could register another new account...The thing is, it is just getting quite uninteresting and discouraging for people who want to have some real discussion to stay on... I have to say that I don't know a better solution, as in such similar situations, than sending complaints to the mod...but I just feel that perhaps this solution is still not enough to fix the whole problem... ====================== Edit 1: I just looked it up and found that gaslighting is indeed an attack vector: a form of manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or members of a group, hoping to make targets question their own memory, perception, and sanity. Using persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying, it attempts to destabilize the target and delegitimize the target's belief. (as defined in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting)