[110011]

That's a good point. I noticed the spectacular bias in the comments on HN as well. Anything relating to Google is almost surely beaten down for no good reason at all.

One of the best examples of this was the new Google Calendar UI announcement. I thought it was a welcome an pleasing change and nothing but a good product getting better, can't we all appreciate that? But the comments on HN were very negative and people floated thoughts like "Oh! Look! Another bored product manager cooking up ways to make Google engineers working for their money etc."

While it's far-fetched it wouldn't come as a great surprise to me if there's some paid troll army going around posting these kind of comments early on a topic to attempt to bias the opinion of people who read stuff here.

[koalaman]

I don't think that they do this anymore, but under Balmer this was a key part of their strategy to compete. https://www.aol.com/2009/08/28/microsofts-secret-screw-googl... http://techrights.org/2009/08/30/anti-google-astroturf-lawme...

I suspect that the campaign was ultimately quite successful at bootstrapping an army of unpaid trolls.

[emodendroket]

There was a "spectacular bias" before too, but it was reflexively in favor of things Google did.