There is no accusation, you're just playing with words to deflect the situation and make it on me instead on the real issue here which is about a company that had more frontpage posts of free positive publicity than most FAANG companies in the last month with a staggering 100% hit rate.
As someone who has spent years upon years fighting with and against corrupt subreddit mods+astroturfing users on reddit:
HN can't do much about upvotes coming from friends if they're sufficiently distributed/no patterns to find.
Also, please consider: their posts are just good/stimulate great discussion across multiple sectors of tech (networking meshing applies to ALMOST EVERYONE!).
