Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

(Flagging here is effectively a type of voting behaviour.)

As to issues with HN's collaborative filtering (voting, flagging, vouching) features, dang's addressed that:

Sure there's abuse of the flagging system; there's abuse of everything. But HN's system as a whole (consisting of community, moderators, and software) has countervailing mechanisms for that and other abuses....

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22153315>