The greatest trick the Russian voting rings, Megaphone, and the 50-cent army pulled is convincing us to shadow-box all the time. We never know when they're in a

The greatest trick the Russian voting rings, Megaphone, and the 50-cent army pulled is convincing us to shadow-box all the time. We never know when they're in action and so we're always seeing a threat. Very clever. This is actually quite interesting to me. We each build up a notion of what the HN community is and what we believe to be its core principles and when we see the 'regulars at our pub' (for want of a better metaphor) suddenly in violent opposition to our views, we immediately conclude it's because it's a bunch of shills. But what about the counterfactual? What if our friends actually violently oppose our views. What would it take to convince ourselves of this? FWIW I think HN is too big to have any sort of unified core principles. It isn't even pro-startup anymore, which is sort of ironic. Here's my hypothesis: Lots of people on HN fully believe the pro-public-transit narrative. You're not downvoted by Chinese voting rings, you're just being disagreed with. Just like when I'm pro-Internet-advertising I'm not downvoted by Big Patreon, I'm just in opposition to the rest of the community. I downvoted you because I hate downvote whining and shill accusation.