Your comment breaks the site rule against insinuating astroturfing or shillage. We enforce that pretty rigorously because it's a poison that can destroy the whole community if we let it. So would you please not do it again, regardless of how wrong someone is or seems?
If you think an account is abusing HN, you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can look at the data. Astroturfing is a bannable offense—but we need to find evidence of it. So is using HN primarily for political, ideological, or national battle. All this is at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Overwhelmingly, though, when users here think they smell astroturfers, shills, spies, bots, and foreign agents, what they're really encountering is the diversity of opinion on this site. HN is deeply divided on most divisive issues, just like society at large is—or rather, societies, because it's a majority international site.
Most of us organize our lives to avoid having opposing opinions in our face all the time. Consequently, when we do encounter them on a site like HN which isn't siloed—i.e. doesn't have any mechanism like subreddits or follow/block—it feels bad and we resort too quickly to the belief that these other people can't possibly be posting in good faith. Mostly, though, they are. The community is just divided that way.
If you think an account is abusing HN, you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can look at the data. Astroturfing is a bannable offense—but we need to find evidence of it. So is using HN primarily for political, ideological, or national battle. All this is at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Overwhelmingly, though, when users here think they smell astroturfers, shills, spies, bots, and foreign agents, what they're really encountering is the diversity of opinion on this site. HN is deeply divided on most divisive issues, just like society at large is—or rather, societies, because it's a majority international site.
Most of us organize our lives to avoid having opposing opinions in our face all the time. Consequently, when we do encounter them on a site like HN which isn't siloed—i.e. doesn't have any mechanism like subreddits or follow/block—it feels bad and we resort too quickly to the belief that these other people can't possibly be posting in good faith. Mostly, though, they are. The community is just divided that way.