id disagree, attention can definitely influence share price, and...

id disagree, attention can definitely influence share price, and internet forums are a form of attention. you can agrue the degree of the influence, but its pretty well known in financial literature that sentiment and attention influence pricing

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304405X15000410#:~:text=We%20find%20that%20high%20market,the%20release%20of%20meaningful%20information

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5441604/
"In this paper, we propose the hypotheses that the investors’ attention will impact on the returns and the trading activities of corresponding stock index in a short time."

Basically it can always be argued by anyone upset with someone else's sentiment here, that any individual is either attempting to increase sentiment and attention in an attempt to play their part in generating higher returns , or is attempting to increase attention with negative sentiment, for the purpose of creating downpressure on the share price and capitalise on either shorting thee stock or buying at a lower price. Theres definitely retail investors that will check hotcopper during their research and make a decision influenced by the sentiment of posts, which will influence their buying behaviour, and there are people who hold shares who may look at their 5 stocks, and need to make a decision about selling 1. public sentiment does influence that decision to some degree, varying indivudal to individual and if enough people are convinced to sell that stock , that benefits shorters/accumulators.

Im not saying this is you, just speaking generally as someone with some education on behaviour finance that you cant really say hotcopper will have no bearing on share prices. If your motive was financial would it really be a total wastee of time to spend 20 seconds on a stock your motivated to influence?

Apparently hotcopper according to them have 200,000 unique visitors every month, 21 million page impressions a month. Thats not insignificant given there is less than a million active retail investors in Australia. Thats 20+% of the retail market whose influence has grown recently in the past few years to 20-25% of total overall trading volume. Given those numbers you can argue Hotcopper is partially responsible in the investment decision for 4-5 % of total daily trades and most definitely worth the small time investment needed for those with enough financial motivation.

Personally if i was truly motivated to maximise the influence of Polynovo share price either up/down, id spam post the relevant sentiment required. Luckily for people here, and what id assume is alot of people here, they and I have other motivations in life that provide enough fulfilment that they dont resort to that sort of desperate behaviour. Thats why people like L***** and A********* (i know most knows who they are just by that) are rather fascinating because you have to weigh up whether the behaviour is an attempt at creating that influence or just mental illness manifesting publicly on an internet forum.