> how can the moderation team reasonably stop bad actors from downvoting it
There are all sorts of approaches that a moderation team could take if they actually believed this was a problem. For example, identify the users who regularly downvote/flag stories like this that end up being cleared by the moderation team for unflagging or the 2nd chance queue and devalue their downvotes/flags in the future.
Accounts are free to make, so bad actors will just create and "season/age" accounts until they have the ability to flag, then rinse and repeat.
I think the biggest thing HN could do to stop this problem is to not make flagging affect an article's ranking until after a human mod reviews the flags and determines them to be appropriate. Right now, all bad actors apparently have to do is be quick on the draw, and get their flagging ring in action ASAP. I'm sure any company's PR team (or motivated Elon worshiper) can buy "100 HN flags on an article" on the dark web right now if they wanted to.
Why would a company like any one of Musk's need to buy these flags? Why wouldn't they just push a button and have their own bots get to work? Plausible deniability?
Who knows whether or not both happen? Ultimately, only the HN admins, and they don't disclose data, so we can only speculate and look for publicly visible patterns.
You can judge their trustworthiness by evaluating their employer's president/CEO, who dictates behavioral requirements regardless of the personal character of each employee
That already happens. I got my flagging powers removed after over-using flag in the past. (I eventually wrote an email to the mods pledging to behave more judiciously and asked for the power back). As a user you won't see any change in the UI when this happens; the flags just stop having any effect on the back end.
There is one subtle clue. If your account has flagging enabled, then whenever you flag something there is a chance that your flag pushes it over the threshold to flagged state. If your account has flagging disabled, this never happens. This is what hinted me to ask dang if I'd been shadowbanned from flagging.
I would be money that already happens, for flagging in particular, since it's right in the line of the moderation queue. For downvotes, it sounds like significant infra would be needed for a product that generates no revenue. Agree that I would like the problem to be solved as well however!
There are all sorts of approaches that a moderation team could take if they actually believed this was a problem. For example, identify the users who regularly downvote/flag stories like this that end up being cleared by the moderation team for unflagging or the 2nd chance queue and devalue their downvotes/flags in the future.