Oh yes I agree. I doubt the big agencies are doing much here just because I don't think this forum is that "useful", it's not really an input into any big state or corporate actor's decision making that's worth paying attention to. I just think it's fairly easy to game this forum and I suspect it is absolutely being gamed by interest groups of individuals who want certain opinions to be more prominent.

I've been on Discords that have told their users to go and brigade HN threads to express their opinions. But these have been petty things like politics and programming language flamewars (two examples I've witnessed.)

How do you think the agencies and corporate suits got everyone to prefer MIT over GPL? It was all astroturfed.