[snowwrestler]

A note of caution on this line of thinking. Pretty much every story you'll ever hear about a commercial subject is going to a) be incomplete and inaccurate, and b) seem beneficial to one party in the story. That's just how stories work.

You can spend your entire online life seeing ghosts of astroturfing in everything you read. Like, how do we know that Huy Fong didn't pay you to come here on HN to neg the Reddit story that makes them look bad? You're stuck trying to prove a negative: impossible.

There is a reason accusations of astroturfing are against the HN guidelines, and it's this: in the absence of evidence, anything opinionated could be astroturfing... or it could not. Which makes it completely useless as a heuristic. It feels like smart skepticism, but it does not actually add any substance to the conversation.