[glenstein]

You can hardly ever be sure when astroturfing is really happening, so all I have to offer is speculation. I feel that this is not Google astroturfing, because Google astroturfing takes on a different flavor.

This is speculation on my part and I want to be very clear about that, but whenever I see something that looks like Google astroturfing, what happens is they frame controversial decisions as technical necessities, like it's just an easier way of solving a technical problem. And they keep trying to reframe questions in technical terms, and try to turn questions of right and wrong into questions where they're simply elaborating on how the technology works, and it's a matter of you not understanding the technology. This was my experience in HN threads about AMP, for instance.

That's my sense of how that works. In this case, I don't think we're seeing anything other than the typical short attention spans.