I want to add something for fair-minded users who may still be wondering, after all that, whether the interest in the OP really is organic or whether there might be shenanigans. It's natural to worry about this, especially because other users tend to make loud and grand claims about abuse, whether they have knowledge or not.
You can check a lot of this for yourself using publicly available information.
Look at a sample of users who've been expressing interest about Tailscale, in threads about that topic and/or Wireguard or other topics. Check out the histories of these users—you can do that by clicking on a username to go to their profile, and then clicking on 'comments' or 'submissions'. You'll see that most are longstanding, serious community members. If your random samples look anything like the ones I've examined, you'll find many excellent HN contributors among them, with a lot of technical expertise. This is evidence that the interest in this topic is both organic and serious. I'd supply links, but it wouldn't feel right to haul in specific usernames that way. It's easy enough to check.
To that public information, I can add some non-public facts. First, the profiles of users upvoting these threads look much the same as the commenters. Of course in many cases they are the same, since it's natural to both upvote and comment on something that you find interesting. In addition, the voting patterns on these threads look like what we see on popular topics of organic interest, and nothing like what we tend to see with voting rings and organized promotion.
Conclusion: although we can never say for sure, because we aren't inside users' heads while they upvote, the evidence points to organic interest. I'll go further: I'm the person who has spent by far the most time on this problem in the history of HN and I find it hard to imagine the evidence being any clearer. Also, no one at HN (and no one at YC that I know of) has any connection with any of the people involved in this project. I've spent so much time writing about this because (a) I don't like to see people smeared, (b) we take concerns about abuse of HN extremely seriously, and (c) I want a record to link back to in the future so I don't have to spend any more sad hours on this.
You can check a lot of this for yourself using publicly available information.
Look at a sample of users who've been expressing interest about Tailscale, in threads about that topic and/or Wireguard or other topics. Check out the histories of these users—you can do that by clicking on a username to go to their profile, and then clicking on 'comments' or 'submissions'. You'll see that most are longstanding, serious community members. If your random samples look anything like the ones I've examined, you'll find many excellent HN contributors among them, with a lot of technical expertise. This is evidence that the interest in this topic is both organic and serious. I'd supply links, but it wouldn't feel right to haul in specific usernames that way. It's easy enough to check.
To that public information, I can add some non-public facts. First, the profiles of users upvoting these threads look much the same as the commenters. Of course in many cases they are the same, since it's natural to both upvote and comment on something that you find interesting. In addition, the voting patterns on these threads look like what we see on popular topics of organic interest, and nothing like what we tend to see with voting rings and organized promotion.
Conclusion: although we can never say for sure, because we aren't inside users' heads while they upvote, the evidence points to organic interest. I'll go further: I'm the person who has spent by far the most time on this problem in the history of HN and I find it hard to imagine the evidence being any clearer. Also, no one at HN (and no one at YC that I know of) has any connection with any of the people involved in this project. I've spent so much time writing about this because (a) I don't like to see people smeared, (b) we take concerns about abuse of HN extremely seriously, and (c) I want a record to link back to in the future so I don't have to spend any more sad hours on this.