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There is a popular subreddit for people with hair loss ("tressless" with almost 500k members) and anyone who recommends the drug Finasteride (banned in Sweden and full of bad side effects e.g. depression, erectile dysfunction, muscle atrophy) gets upvoted and anyone who recommends against it gets their post removed from the front page of the subreddit and a squad of people attacking you. It is obvious some pharmaceutical company is behind this.

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I would not underestimate how badly people make things part of their identity and see attacks against those things as attack against them. So it might be just moderators being overinvested in something on personal level.

Of course there will always be a mixture of things. Some of these people attacking could just be insecure people trying to justify their life choices through strangers (ton of those across the internet) but it is at such a scale and consistency that the stakes seem higher than that.

Very interesting that this got downvoted. Shouldn't even be controversial on HN. There might be an actual cult around this drug and not just a moderator issue.

Yup, I have now observed this a few times go up and down a couple of times. Very strange behaviour surrounding this without any negative response. Society is cooked.

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