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Thanks for asking the question and putting so much care into stating it. I have no idea what kind of methods HN employs. I personally always check the posting

Thanks for asking the question and putting so much care into stating it. I have no idea what kind of methods HN employs. I personally always check the posting history when I'm in doubt about the intentions of a poster. Most of the time, I find an extensive amount of fairly well considered comments on a variety of topics. That leads me to the conclusion that the account is 'genuine'. To state it a bit more naively: if a Sybil attack would require the attacker to craft so many constructive comments in order to evade detection, it could actually have a net positive effect on the community as a whole.

smichel17 6y ago
More succinctly: https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/
mercer 6y ago
> I personally always check the posting history when I'm in doubt about the intentions of a poster. I do the same, and in the cases where it's somewhat obviously a new or 'bad intentioned' it still surprises me how fast the comments are grayed out and/or dead (often within minutes). I've always been curious how much of that was human curation and how much of it some algorithm. I've never gotten to see or play around with HN-style site data, but personally I'd probably write some code that takes into account valuable 'curator' users (with some checks and safeguards of course, and manually tagged by the moderators).