It 100% absolutely is, you're just too deep to recognize it.
It's what's happened across Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook over the past decade. You've all built platforms intended for social discourse but instead built extremely brittle systems subject to gamified manipulation by showing people which opinions reward and punish them. And those are then manipulated at-large by outside groups responsible for elevating a particular way of thinking about a given topic.
Conversations do not need a algorithmic popularity mechanism.
That's just not an accurate description of HN based on what I know, but of course it's indeed possible that I'm too embedded to see clearly.
Edit: some of these points can be refuted by data though (albeit not public data, which means people have to take our word for it, which many are understandably reluctant to do). For example, flaggers of these stories are by and large longstanding community members who have participated for years on HN in lots of threads about lots of topics, etc. That doesn't prove they're not flagging at the behest of outside groups, but it does make it unlikely.
That would be a disaster of epic proportions. Every thread, no matter how innocuous the topic, would devolve into perpetual feuds about which kinds of people were upvoting and downvoting which other kinds. These sorts of shitstorms were pretty common on HN, in the long-long-ago, and even then all we were revealing were comment scores, not voting attribution.
Then we remove upvotes and downvote entirely. Web2.0 online discourse (visibility is controlled by recommendation algos keyed on upvotes/downvotes) is fundamentally broken.
That would create a different forum. HN is an experiment in how long this kind of forum can ward off gravitational collapse. There are things fundamentally wrong with these kinds of forums, but that's true of every kind of forum.
Not to pile on what tptacek has already nicely said, but I agree and still think there is plenty of room for new forums. The vast majority of possible permutations have not been tried yet, and I wish more people would.
It's what's happened across Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook over the past decade. You've all built platforms intended for social discourse but instead built extremely brittle systems subject to gamified manipulation by showing people which opinions reward and punish them. And those are then manipulated at-large by outside groups responsible for elevating a particular way of thinking about a given topic.
Conversations do not need a algorithmic popularity mechanism.