[dang]

> Preemptive edit: the stealth marketing is so so thick in this thread! Yuck!

It breaks the HN guidelines to insinuate astroturfing unless you have evidence. Please don't do that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

People having opposing views isn't evidence of 'stealth marketing', it's evidence that the community is big and, on most things, divided. Meanwhile the "astroturfer under every bed" trope is one of the toxins that poisons internet communities—if it doesn't kill, it causes brain damage. Therefore we all need to resist the temptation to go there, unless there's really evidence, in which case you should email us at [e-mail] so we can investigate and ban offenders.

[8077628]

Hopefully you guys are doing some due diligence, because there's no way for a user to have "evidence", no matter how canned and repetitive and glowing the comments above are. Obviously common sense doesn't cut the mustard here.

[dang]

We sure are. You can do some too, simply by looking at the account histories of the commenters you feel might be astroturfing.

Overwhelmingly the true hypothesis is the null one: people just disagree. The assumption that no one could possibly hold opinion X in good faith, so therefore they must be shilling, is imaginary. Such accusations in the threads are toxic, so we don't allow it unless there's some indication of more than imagination at work. This has been HN policy for years now and I've posted a ton about it: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...