Yeah, it's astroturfing for sure. But it's very well done astroturfing, which makes for entertaining reading. Anyone who doesn't realize this doesn't read very critically.
Please don't impute astroturfing or shillage. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about it, email us and we'll look at the data.
That guideline refers to commenting on comments on HN. Some of them may be astroturf, but it's of no benefit to discuss that possibility, because usually that means a fellow HN person will be upset.
The possibility that TFA is astroturf, or perhaps a more apt term may be "submarine", is entirely appropriate for discussion. If it weren't, we'd be really handicapped in evaluating anything that gets posted to HN.
While the guideline may be explicitly directed at comments, its purpose is to discourage people from defaulting to positions of bad faith. This is equally true for articles. With accusations such as this, it's particularly pernicious because they're hard to defend against: once you tread down the path of assuming bad faith, any argument against it is likewise assumed to be in bad faith: you've already dismissed them as untrustworthy. That's why the bar is so high with respect to comments: you need to have proof. I think it's perfectly acceptable to hold a similar standard when discussing submissions.
I appreciate your position, but we simply disagree on this point. If you're interested, I'd recommend re-reading PG's "Submarine" essay. One can smell the sickly-sweet odor of PR on this headline, before even clicking through to TFA, at which point one can barely smell anything else.
After reading TFA, we may conclude that this company is developing a telemedicine product, and that they had some sort of arrangement with a nursing home on Long Island. Concluding anything else, positive or negative, based on obvious self-reportage is not "faith", it's credulousness. It would even be a mistake to fault this company for using obvious PR; every successful firm does the same.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I have similar reservations about PG's piece† it's application on HN suffers from overuse, compounded by invoking it has the cover of being authored by PG himself. I do think there's room for disagreement, though, and I'm confident we have the same goal: earnest, quality discussion here on HN. Cheers!
† I don't disagree the phenomenon exists, is problematic, and something to be on the lookout for, just that I don't think it's as interesting as its many references may suggest.
Grzm, there a lot of great telemedicine startups[1]. I think they should live and die on the merits of their technology, not their founder stories or plant in MSN.
I think if this article spent some time highlighting those competitors and briefly discussed their advantages / disadvantages over this one, I would have been less skeptical.
I completely agree. I think pointing out those other other startups as well as pointing out additional information you'd like the article to address (perhaps adding more information you may have) as you've done here are great additions to the discussion. Going around in circles discussing possible but unsubstantiated underhandedness is less so. As is elongating this thread for that matter, so I'll do my part in refraining from further additions.
While that may be true, 95% of news media is not also promoting a company without doing much (or any) research to balance out its positivity.
Does that mean most of the puff pieces about companies are written or bought by the company they're about? Yes. In that, almost everything you've read by a "Contributor" on Forbes.com fits under that category. The firewall between editorial and advertising at most media companies has fallen apart.
This isn't that, though. This is some weird PR thing that doesn't even seem to appear on the normal site, as far as I can tell.
