Not strictly a democracy of people, though, is it? There are opaque algorithms behind the scenes doing their magic, and moderators who step in and distort the "democratic" process; it isn't just about upvotes.

(In the case of HN, I'm not criticising this; in general I think it's probably MUCH better than it would be if it didn't have these non-democratic mechanisms helping to manage the site. I don't actually trust that "a democracy of people" can be relied on to make good decisions, in general.)

I don't know that HN is a democracy at all. I tried submitting an article, and the site posted the article on my behalf from some bot account and it never saw the light of day.

I guess having a check like that is a good thing. Take reddit for example, people usually post third hand articles because the primary source is probably a paywalled article from a proper journalism outlet, and posts are subjected to sweeping vote manipulation. It's not a cultural cross section either, the types of people who post on reddit are a vast minority; I wouldn't be suprised if it was less than 5% of users. And users of sites like reddit/HN are not representative at all of the country or the world really. These sites heavily skew towards the educated, high income, male, and white, so you miss out on a lot of valuable perspective if you only use these sorts of sites.

> "I tried submitting an article, and the site posted the article on my behalf from some bot account and it never saw the light of day."

I haven't observed behavior like this. HN does have dedupe behavior that prevents the same piece being submitted multiple times within some time frame. How this looks to the duplicate submitter is that upon clicking "submit", rather than creating a new submission, it redirects you to original. This could appear that it's getting submitted by some other account, but isn't what actually happened.