True in my experience when I asked for my comment to be deleted.
> Complaining about being downvoted is discouraged and usually results in even more downvotes.
It works sometimes however. My comment [1] was controversial and was moving up and down between negative and +4 votes for the first two hours of its life. After I made the edit complaining about the downvotes, it started rising rapidly and is now resting at +22.
> Hacker News encourages a single discussion on a given story. All others are marked as a [dupe] and will be killed without the ability to vouch.
An addendum is that from my experience, it is unclear which story the mods will consider the dupe, sometimes the earlier posted story will be called the dupe.
> Relatedly, moderators can also invite users via email to resubmit a post which didn't get much traction.
This happened to my "All the goodness gone from tea (1688)" [2] submission. I am amazed that a moderator read a submission that was only +2 in its original form and also had difficult ergonomics because it was on google books.
> One popular "trick" for obfuscating voting manipulation ... This trick doesn't actually work.
So, undetectable vote manipulation hasn't been detected and there fore doesn't exist? I have trouble believing this. This seems more like a call to not even try claiming that it won't work, because it just might work. I wish some charitable soul with gray morals would step up with their story of voter manipulation that wasn't detected. Tooling could be developed to curb its use by other individuals. They can do this privately to the mods.