Is a Claw driven Hacker News user a problem?

I don't particularly desire to do so (anymore), but even if I rolled a d20 to a nat 1 and that critical miss of a color was unconditionally applied to my new car, wholly decoupling any involvement of my desires with the obvious and catastrophic outcomes of a polished mirror finish on other drivers, I still owe it to my society to evaluate whether proceeding to drive that vehicle is ethical or not.

You can't conditional 'is this ethical' on whether or not one desires one of the outcomes ('amplified impact', in this case). Whether or not I desire the specific outcome of the one hundred vehicle crashes my mirror-polished car would cause, the harm of that outcome itself imposes a rather severe ethical burden on the choice to drive that car at all. As is perhaps obvious (or perhaps not!), it would be highly unethical to drive such a vehicle on open-to-the-public surfaces regardless of whatever your desires and motivations may be.

So, similarly, whether or not they desire to disrupt the balance of voting at HN, they are correct to recognize that their plans will, regardless of their interest or lack thereof, impact the site's algorithmic and voting outcomes. That disruption could present an ethical concern, and so they brought that concern to the community that would most be impacted — us, here! — and asked for our input. That is, in general, a sensible approach to working through the ethical concerns of complex outcomes impacting societies. The example provided is exaggerated to prioritize efficacy over plausibility. And it's to the credit of OP that they asked even though this impact would bring the site into closer alignment with their own interests and desires. In a contrasting example of outcomes to such concerns, HN users still post archive.is links to this day even though that site's owner/operator intentionally 'infected' all of our browsers with DDoS malware when visiting their site in order to abuse a single person. 'HN user voluntarily asks for serious ethical guidance from a community impacted by their software' was not something I ever expected to see here. Made my day.

ps. Uh, I'd forgotten something. I did as a kid want a car just like the spaceship from Flight of the Navigator for years, even though society would punish me for it, and had forgotten about that for decades. It took discovering Asimov's Zeroth (Robots and Society) in my early teens for me to understand why I needed to account for a society's needs when evaluating the ethics of my own decisions, rather than just taking for granted the ethical patterns I was raised with. Thanks for the surprise nostalgic memories :D

Even early on, there were graphical browsers, text mode browsers, tools like wget and curl (not everyone had access to a graphical desktop!). Services like AltaVista allowed one to approach the web in yet another way, spidering the web and surfacing information through full-text-search that couldn't be found through just surfing.

And this is before we get to people with visual impairments using screen-readers or braille terminals. Or folks connecting to the internet over expensive satellite or infrequent wifi who might want to batch their web-fetches and read in their own time.

As far as I'm concerned you're just continuing that tradition with more modern tools. Semantic tools. Carry on. Put your tools on a git site someplace if you'd like to share!

ps. see also the exploits of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_%22Kibo%22_Parry (he grepped the entire usenet feed for mentions of his name, and allegedly always answered) . Use your powers for good! (see eg altairprime's comment for a definition of 'good' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48260183 )

pps. if I want to telnet info.cern.ch 80 I should still darn well be able to! Uphill, both ways, in driving snow!

ppps. https://line-mode.cern.ch/www/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html <- eg using a line mode browser.