[mtmail]

Good analysis and I can only agree.

I'm a HN user who regularly looks for patterns like connected accounts, weird upvote or comment behaviour in /newest, fake news, bots and reports those to the moderators.

Until today I haven't known about Tailscale, or not conciously remember the brand name. Every past article listed I would've probably upvoted. It fits with the HN audience, just like Docker, ElasticSearch, Cloudflare, gitlab or most polished SaaS companies targetting developers when they release a new major feature. There will always be a commercial/marketing component when companies release something, even more when a founder or employee answers questions in comments. Doesn't mean there's some kind of secret community who upvote each other. Or rather if there was the moderators, once notified, would've found and acted on that.