To be fair you commented hours after this was posted. What was shown and downvoted changed greatly from that point in time. When I first saw this thread the exact issues the OP was stating were in fact playing out.
A thread on a sensational topic tends to fill up early with reflexive, a.k.a. thoughtless, comments simply because those are the fastest to write and because the people with the strongest feelings on a topic have the most activation energy to comment. Unfortunately such comments tend to be superficial ones that merely repeat pre-existing positions—usually angrily—about the generic theme (China is a popular one these days but it can be anything people feel strongly about). Sometimes they come with pre-baked talking points that sound detailed enough, but are still superficial, generic reactions because they're being pasted in from previous places.
It takes time for reflective, a.k.a. thoughtful, comments to emerge, especially about the specifics of a story.
Reflexive/generic/superficial comments get downvoted, but not because communist agents are manipulating the threads or because the bulk of the community disagrees. They get downvoted because they're high-indignation-low-information, and tedious. In other words, they're flamebait, which is against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The users who post and upvote such comments, unfortunately, draw exactly the wrong conclusion from this. They take a flying leap into feeling certain that the community (and/or mods) is biased toward the view they dislike and stacked against their own view. They somehow manage not to notice the countless posts that support their positions and are upvoted just fine. Then they start a meta flamewar about the site being clearly biased / obviously infiltrated. That flamewar is even more reflexive, angry, and off topic than the first one.
> What was shown and downvoted changed greatly from that point in time.
Which is exactly why the moderators frown upon comments that mope about astroturfing - they add nothing but noise to the discussion. Any weird voting biases will even-out over time. If you suspect astroturfing, send an email to the mods instead of degrading the quality of conversation.
I don't know if "nothing but" is fair. They add noise, certainly. But if astroturfing is happening, to pretend by fiat that it's not significantly distorts the discourse.
If astroturfing were happening, the best course of action would be to alert moderation. Baseless accusations of astroturfing help literally no one, and poison discourse.
I saw it within ten minutes of it being posted, it didn't reflect reality. I drafted this when it said it was posted thirty-five minutes ago. I sent it after an hour of the post being up. I sent mail to the site's moderation about this post's title when there were only four comments or so, not including the one we're discussing. At none of these points was what the person said true.
I think I've had a fairly-conclusive watch on this post; the accusations in his post don't reflect reality and haven't.
