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