If they were this article wouldn't appear on the front page in the first place; it's a community vote, and while one could posit it's malicious actors / bots / etc, at the same time there's enough people that are sick of political reporting and articles.

It's the downside of a democratic system, if enough people dislike it things will go away.

Making sure people are "sick" of political reporting and articles is exactly the strategy of modern authoritarian governance, from Russia to Hungary.

The US Founding Fathers would judge extremely harshly modern people disengaging from their duties as citizens.

My duties as a citizen are one thing. I don't have those same duties as a reader of HN, though. This site doesn't have to be /r/politics; we have /r/politics for that.

Having experienced the oligarch takeover in the post-Soviet Ukraine, looking at it from the inside is as surreal. People will be studying this collapse for centuries, and this is ONLY the beginning.