[sz4kerto]

I don't think so :), we're not that important. So far only 3 comments have been seriously downvoted -- one of them presented seemingly unfounded information, the other one was simply unfunny trolling that should not be on HN, the third one was mostly off-topic.

Because of - to some extent understandable - reasons MS hate is still quite strong among this community but destroying an MS-related thread is unnecessary.

[dangero]

Do you really think a site has to be "important" to be targeted? To influence public opinion it seems like you'd just want to blanket influence as many popular websites as possible. It wouldn't take that large a team to do it given the right software.

[sz4kerto]

I was a part-owner and later a mod on a quite big forum (>500k registered users, etc.). There were many people who always claimed that others who disagree with them are paid shills -- I happened to know that they aren't at all.

[girvo]

Heh, same here. If everyone who accused someone of being a shill was right, then everyone would be a shill, almost. Hilarious stuff, literally insinuating that someone had built up a reputation on a tech magazine forum over half a decade to shill products. In fact, I think in the years I was a mod/admin, we banned maybe one "shill", and even that was debatable and mainly because they didn't post any relevant information for anything else.