[savingthrow]

The first one is just someone asking for a product recommendation, and someone else giving a recommendation. Nothing about that looks like astroturfing.

The second one is from an account who doesn't push their tutorial in most comments. A search for [author:vram22 gumroad] shows no submissions for that domain, and a handful of comments.

It's fine for people on HN to push their product, so long as they don't do it too much and so long as they're clear that it is their product.

If you really think something is being shilled it's far better to email the mods to let them know than it is to start meta-threads.

[aboutruby]

The few times I emailed [e-mail] I didn't get any responses.

Anyway, I just wanted to see if others thought Hacker News was being astroturfed, I never said those are sure case of astroturfing.

For example this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19419362

Ok looks like it might be, but then I have to check the comment history to make sure this user is legitimate, which look like he is legitimate. So I guess I have to check the comment history of every user that makes a link to a paid product... sounds like a pain that could be automated.

Also, like for the commenters weirdly supporting China, I think the comment history is made in such a way to disguise the nature of the account (otherwise it would be too easy to figure it out, basic spam gets killed very quickly on HN thankfully)

(edit: Looking at your history, your account is 4 years old with two comments in this thread and one comment 4 years ago, may be a highjacked account)

[dang]

I only saw this now. I can't find any emails from the email address registered to your account. We're pretty meticulous about responding to everyone who contacts us with such concerns, so I'm wondering what could have been going on there.

The link you included here looks completely innocuous to me.

Your China comment here is close to nationalistic flamebait (not allowed on HN) and breaks the HN guideline against insinuating astroturfing without evidence (please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). The overwhelming majority of the time, such insinuation are baseless—and they do harm to this site and to commenters being unfairly accused. If anyone wants a clear example, look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358. This is why we have such guidelines.

Finally, attacking the person you're replying to like that by casting groundless aspersions on their posting history is a violation of HN's civility rule. People are welcome to post here at whatever rate they feel like. They're not incriminating themselves by doing so.

[aboutruby]

> We're pretty meticulous about responding to everyone who contacts us with such concerns, so I'm wondering what could have been going on there.

I'm talking about past experience with previous accounts.

> Please don't impute astroturfing or shillage. That degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about it, email us and we'll look at the data.

Ok, never saw this rule actually, thanks.

> Finally, attacking the person you're replying to like that by casting groundless aspersions on their posting history is a violation of HN's civility rule.

Yes, I never look at people's post history, not sure why I did. I also usually never reply to other people's comments and should be more strict about that.

[dang]

It's possible your emails went to spam and we missed it. That's not so likely though, especially since you say there were repeated cases. We look through the spam bin and try to fish out all the HN-related emails.

More likely, if you emailed us repeatedly and didn't get a response, is that your previous accounts were involved in some form of abuse and we didn't believe that the emails were in good faith. Either that or it was 5+ years ago, when pg was running HN and didn't have time to respond to emails like we do.

[aboutruby]

It was a while ago, I don’t create new accounts for ban-escaping but for privacy reasons.