You are operating on the assumption that analysis of the text is required. Nothing I'm admittedly vaguely mentioning requires analysis of any bulk amounts of te

You are operating on the assumption that analysis of the text is required. Nothing I'm admittedly vaguely mentioning requires analysis of any bulk amounts of text or requiring massive manpower or anything that ends in a hopeless sense of "it can't be done reasonably". It most certainly can. Distributed mobs of clever humans or bots can't actually hide. One other thing: I'm not expressing a theory up for debate. I'm only mentioning that there are already alternatives of detecting downvote mobs and similar interference. This is already in production. The old saying "If you believe its impossible then you're right". As for HN, many downvotes are (ab)used for disagreement rather than the comment being wrong or factually incorrect. I've seen this on HN plenty of times. At minimum, all downvotes should require an associated comment or upvoted reply so the offending commenter knows exactly what happened.