The problem is that there's a finite number of writers of substantive articles; the strategy used by these trolls-in-chief is to overload these writers by conducting a blitzkrieg of events. By preventing substantive articles from being created for each event, they benefit the lack of public discourse that occurs for each singular event.
Thus I feel like youre right in everything youve said, but your decision is exactly what the trolls were hoping for. I think part of it is the design of hackernews threads; I think the old internet 1.0 forum style would be better suited for today's discourse. Having a dozen stickied threads for each of the executive orders inside of a sub forum for "news and events", for example.
The old 1.0 forums went by the wayside for good reasons, but the current upvote style has been in place for a long enough time now for bad actors to learn the strategies that manipulate the upvote system. IMO there's a need for a new forum style to replace the upvote/article based system.
Is that really want the trolls were hoping for? A political researcher interpretation (published on Swedish national news) was that this kind of behavior is historically common, where a group or person want to generate news by first initiating a provocation and then directly denying and distance themselves from it. The goal is to both cause provocation in order to generate media coverage, and also to distance themselves from the interpretation in order to paint themselves (for the in-group) in a good light while at the same time framing the opposition. In extension this helps them to distance the in-group from the out-group. The analyze also mention a possible in-group that include pro-Israel, which makes the distancing of the interpreted provocation critical.
That may or may not be a correct analyze of the situation, and other political researchers might make a different interpretation, but in that scenario the goal is to get people to talk about it. The opposite would be for the story to be buried and ignored.
Thus I feel like youre right in everything youve said, but your decision is exactly what the trolls were hoping for. I think part of it is the design of hackernews threads; I think the old internet 1.0 forum style would be better suited for today's discourse. Having a dozen stickied threads for each of the executive orders inside of a sub forum for "news and events", for example.
The old 1.0 forums went by the wayside for good reasons, but the current upvote style has been in place for a long enough time now for bad actors to learn the strategies that manipulate the upvote system. IMO there's a need for a new forum style to replace the upvote/article based system.