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Comment by SpicyLemonZest | Hacker News Reader

Note to readers that there's been a flood of new accounts like this one, whose first and only comment is "haha we'll be in quarantine for 2 years". This is the third one I've noticed in the past 2 days. Either it's a popular troll or someone's making a concerted effort to manipulate the discourse; in either case I think it's important not to take this seriously.

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Please don't post this sort of insinuation of astroturfing. There's a site guideline specifically against it: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The reason is that people are far too quick to leap to this interpretation, and since we have next to no data about each other from HN posts, pretty much every divisive topic gets drowned in such insinuations if allowed to.

Lots more explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Sure, I'll refrain, but I hope you're taking into account that these kinds of astroturfed comments are causing significant harm.

Sure you'll refrain, but then you do it again in the same sentence? That is not cool.

Thanks dang

I had to step off Reddit entirely for this very reason. Comments like this are commonplace, and get thousands of upvotes. It's bizarre.

Reddit has been invaded by legions of newly minted authoritarians who think we should lock everything down with martial law and shoot anyone who dares to come out of their house. On the flip side, there's more than a few people suggesting this is all an elaborate hoax designed to give the gov't vastly increased control of the citizenry.

They feed off each other.

And HN isn't entirely immune. I see some of it happening here too, though it is not as prevalent as on Reddit.

Nah I just keep getting shadow banned because dang works for Apple.

Also, look at the argument, not the user. You have appeal to authority fallacy.

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