[dang]

> and HN

If you have specific evidence of abuse on HN, please tell us at [e-mail] so we can investigate. If you don't, the site guidelines ask you not to make such insinuations: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Overwhelmingly, people decide they're seeing astroturfing as a reflex response to any view they sufficiently dislike. That is an internet sauce that we all need to get off of.

More explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... The point isn't that astroturfing doesn't exist, it's that on HN, users need to comment about it factually and not simply do fantasy projection. The latter is the most common case and therefore the null hypothesis when this comes up.