There’s a huge influx of new HN users. Like, a massive spike over the last few months. I don’t think it’s worth worrying about voting patterns until they’ve had time to steep in HN’s culture. I’ve noticed similar fluctuations in pretty much anything remotely controversial I’ve posted.

The more alarming aspect was the shrillness of replies, which seem to generally go unchallenged. I don’t like the idea that people think HN is for loudness. But thankfully that seems to be a minor fluctuation.

The sibling reply from Freedom2 is right too — your comment (other than the downvote complaints, which I know is hard to resist) generated some good discussion.

Is there some place where I can see the data that backs up this influx of users? I ask because I believe you because I’ve felt that way too recently, but I’d love to verify it.

Sure is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34110321 Hacker News Insight.

I hope it’s a measurement error, because the spike is literally a J.

Dunno. It does feel as if discourse on HN has become less thoughtful and more angry/Reddit-esque…

Well, there's a whole HN subreddit that exists solely to post HN threads and encourage redditors to visit HN for more discussion.

It's still somewhat nascent, but with more high profile articles posted, you'll see more people coming over.

Fortunately, the UI here is not good enough to probably hold redditor interest in the long term.

Use the HN API and just pull all the users, it's got created date, then feed to your favorite BI tool.

How many are bots being crafted into sockpuppet accounts to silence damaging information.

You can’t downvote until 500 karma so it doesn’t matter. HN has voting ring detection as well.

I regularly pull HN data from the API. Any idea what kind of pattern I should look for? Like? Old+low karma? Maybe I could use GPT to analyze someone comment history?

Does HN not still require a certain level of upvotes to get access to voting?

I’ve always only been able to upvote; I’m guessing that lurking means I’ve never gained enough upvotes to access anything else.

Yeah the FAQ seems like you can upvote but not downvote until you have a certain amount of karma. I don't remember when I unlocked the downvote.

I think what's most important is that "curious" discussion was generated out of your comment! Despite what you may think, I believe the discussion spawned out of it was a resounding success.