Around 2000 Slashdot was the premier tech forum and had a feature where you could have "hidden" comment threads, around which evolved a community of trolls who would compete to craft the most ridiculous and successful trolls and then post them for others to enjoy. My favourite being "The moon - a ridiculous liberal myth".
Anyway, at some point someone had the idea to set up our own site which we would position as a deeply serious technology and political opinion site, which was Adequacy.org. Stories were mostly from the editors, who could also post comments only visible to other editors, sadly lost to history.
The author of the linked story wasn't one of the original trolls from Slashdot that made up the site's initial editors, they were someone who got the joke and became an editor. And for scale I think I had the second most commented story on the site, and it doesn't come close - and we had to disable commenting after a while due to the site crashing from the load every half-hour or so....
Whilst it might be, the same traits were being used in active propaganda campaigns by those tech companies invested in killing off Linux (you know who)