No, "low effort provocations" has nothing to do with "disinformation" or "spreading knowable lies". I am genuinly astonished that you think all those things are synonyms.
news.ycombinator.com does this right -- moderators rarely moderate based on the message or idea in a post and their opinion about its truth-value. Rather, posts are moderated for being provocative, overly rude, including slurs, low effort, and so on.
I'm making the point that deliberate misinformation is provocation. Claims without evidence, baseless contrarian assertions with no semblance of logic, is provocation. Posting snarky one-liner "rebuttals" to a paragraphs-long post is provocation.
Not all of those things deserve the same level of reaction, but they are a disservice to useful conversation and should be moderated/downvoted accordingly.
I agree that HN does it correctly, so I wonder where our disconnect is.
