I've noticed that myself and attributed it to the site having a large percentage of U.S. readers. It's annoying when there's scientific studies and then a lot of the comments take a particular political stance about the topic.
The submission itself usually disappears from the front page very quickly too which might be because of the low quality comments.
Interesting that they are linked to a limited number of people - that does imply astroturfing to my mind.
I'm glad to see that I'm wrong about it being a U.S.-centric site. My default assumption is that a lot of websites are heavily U.S. biased and a 50% U.S. vs the rest of the world sounds like a good mix to me. (I'm in the UK).
So basically astroturfing? Does this type of activity automatically get flagged? I wish there were a way for us regular users to be able to detect this. Otherwise, we end up with these discussions where people conclude that something is, say, a widespread mentality in the U.S, or a "Silicon Valley thing", when in reality it could be a small number of bad actors.
It's quite difficult to assess what's happening on HN from the outside (I know, I've tried).
It's both bad form and against guidelines to make accusations.
But you can ping mods if you suspect some sort of promotion/demotion ring, sockpuppets, etc. I'd emailed dang about an hour ago on this thread. My regret is not having done so earlier.
> a lot of the comments take a particular political stance about the topic.
And oftentimes, these political stances are US-centric and don't make sense to anyone else, e.g. you might have an article about the efficacy of masks and then you'll read a dozen comments saying that "Fauci lied to us", which is completely irrelevant to anyone not living in the US (if you really wanted to generalise it, you'd have to claim that politicians in most countries lied to their people which IMHO is a much harder sell, but whatever).
Whilst much of Europe is well past climate denialism, with the exception of the petro-fascist state of Russia, there's still an active English-speaking denialist community in the UK, less so in politics than in the largely right-wing / conservative press, with such people as Matt Ridley leading that brigade.
I spend a great deal of time reading and listening to news from across Europe, and the degree to which climate, degrowth, and energy transition are treated as mainstream topics is far ahead of the US, another petro-state.
(Notably, Norway doesn't seem to have followed the lead of other petro-states in climate denial that I'm aware, though its own oil-wealth legacy is distinctive on several grounds.)
The submission itself usually disappears from the front page very quickly too which might be because of the low quality comments.