Please don't break the site guidelines like this. These comments are beyond a dime-a-dozen, more like a nickle-a-thousand, and they're basically all the product of breathless internet user fantasy. HN users need to have a little more self-control than that if we're to preserve this site for interesting conversation. I've been trying to explain this to this community for years, so if I seem a little irritated and impatient, I hope you can understand why:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
I'm trying to figure out what happened (I don't keep track of these things while I'm asleep), but having taken a quick look so far I can tell you for sure that the flags were from legit, longstanding, entirely boring HN users. (Edit: I did not mean to insult those HN users. I meant that if people saw the list of usernames, they'd find it boring because there would be nothing sinister in it.)
Sounds like a rough start to the day. Might I suggest an extra coffee. Works for me when I get to work and everything is on fire.
When the topic of discussion is censorship and disinformation online (that includes HN), no one is pulling out astroturfing as rhetoric to shutdown a conversation, it is literally part of the conversation. A moderator coming in here to tamp down on our discussion of disinformation is ironic and self-defeating. This conversation was interesting until you showed up telling us to stop.