I think this is probably happening, but also there are just a ton of actual Zionists and Israelis in the tech industry. Unfortunately they visit this site regularly and police it against honest reporting about their crimes.

100%. Especially on topics involving countries with vast online propaganda operations.

HN doesnt have any defense against it, and the userbase is small enough that it would be highly effective.

I've seen lots of suspiciously new accounts hoping into these conversations. Saying questionable things.

With things like Openclaw it’s kind of trivial to game forums now. You just have to tell an agent to “post arguments for/against this perspective on this forum.” Give it a few talking points to include if you want to get specific and let it run. Specify the tone so it sounds realistic. It’s literally going to do everything else essentially forever or until you run out of tokens. Comments in a forum are dirt cheap so it’s also going to be very cheap.

What are the chances that HN is getting astroturfed these days?

Happens all day every day. There are many AI agents starting discussions and replying to comments. This is how The Crappening started on 4chan. Some of them are just future grifters. Some are training AI (I have replied to a few for fun). Some are propaganda bots. Those running the bots will reply with something equiv to Errrm Proof?? when called out. Without root I can not empirically prove it and the botters know that.

I predict about 2 years before the site will have more AI noise than real people. I have no idea what can be done about it aside from tracking the bots and reporting them via email to Daniel and I don't know what he could or would do. HN has always been very hands off which is mostly good but not for this scenario. If nothing is done it will just be bots grifting and AstroTurfing one another to the benefit of Google SEO and most of the humans would eventually go elsewhere with exception of some die-hards that refuse to recognize the situation.

You should point out the exact posts.

Mods are explicitly rolling back the no-political advocacy guideline - Dan G has said he’s explicitly unflagging political content which is why HN is filled with left wing activism.

I mean does it matter?

At this point, lines have been drawn. In conservative land, everything conservative is good, everything liberal is bad. So the only sane position to take is the complete opposite.

For example, if you see someone self proclaimed liberal being critical of liberals, that person is probably a conservative or its a conservative bot.