Let's see if you still feel that way in 5 minutes.
Edit: I'm tired and let my snark guard down—sorry. No, I don't want to "quietly get rid" of this kind of topic, except insofar as lurid sensationalism isn't what HN is for. This story is unusual enough that it gets a bit of a curiosity pass.
"Riskiness" in any dark sinister sense doesn't play into any of this on the HN side. It's all boringly straightforward, with just enough randomness to be confusing.
People assume all kinds of things—whatever they want. Trying to stop that is a madhouse ticket. One eventually learns these things although in my case it seems to take years.
Another slow learning is that it's a bad idea to undertake impossible tasks like "showing clear evidence that astroturfing is not the norm"; especially before breakfast.
Btw, though - no one is denying "front page manipulation", though manipulation is an emotionally loaded word. HN is a curated site, always has been. I've posted, let's see, 70,000 comments as an HN moderator and thousands of those are precisely about this. How "posting thousands of comments of explanation" turns into "denying the idea of" is a good example of the first sentence of my comment here.
