I have a suspicion there is massive (organized?) downvoting going on in the past few weeks or months but hard to prove since hn doesn't make enough data visible.
Thanks for your comment and sharing that link! Very useful website.
I also have a similar suspicion. Feels like if you have billions of dollars of investment in AI, then crashing things in the internet that criticize you, can easily be solved for a few millions. If this is the case, for me, it is the biggest proof that AI won't live up to the hype.
I wanted to say it doesn't have to be planned from the top because people naturally want to flock to a cause. But I also remembered a certain billionaire paying people to play computer games under his account to boost his stats. Paying people or bots to downvote criticism is certainly not below him or any of the others, it's just marketing expenditure.