HN has already lost a lot of quality posters over the last 10 years. It’s a drop in the bucket as more and more new registrations happen anyway.
For the savvy reader: the best kind of astroturfing on a tech site involves nerdsniping. Make a small obvious error and you’ll get people trampling over each other to correct you. Never underestimate how smug stooges can pay off. Keep an eye out for these kinds of posts (see Twitter blue thread).
Well we tried this whole “open your eyes” thing in a different way. We tried, and still do to some degree, to highlight who is in charge of these companies, what their backgrounds tend to be in the great majority of cases. To look for patterns and agendas. How is it orchestrated, these sorts of things. But then we get deplatformed and ostracized.
The end result of which is that some people, having been burned, who once would have defended a better internet than the one we have now, are perfectly fine with watching it burn.