That's not how the burden of proof works. It's also not so much about trying not to make "the site look bad", it's more that it generally leads to baseless wit

That's not how the burden of proof works. It's also not so much about trying not to make "the site look bad", it's more that it generally leads to baseless witchhunts and flame wars. HN has an advantage over Twitter and other social networks: posts are supposed to be insightful instead of merely pictures of cats or people doing funny tricks. As a result we can criticize posts based on their intrinsic values instead of having to go meta and wonder about the intentions of the person posting them. If a bot manages to posts dozens of interesting stories that make it up to the top of the front page every day I say we keep it...