I suspect there are several PR firms active on HN. Some topics were suddenly very popular out of nowhere and criticising it was getting you a wall of downvote. Then it stopped.
More than any other tech company, negative things about Apple will get you quickly down voted into oblivion. Hard to know if its just rabid fanboys, or PR firms. Unfortunately, HN isn't interested in naming and shaming companies caught astroturfing and they don't like us to speculate. Its too bad because I would consider that information a huge kindness to humanity.
As someone who used to work in a reputation management firm, this is considered industry practice regarding public engagement.
Chances are keywords of interest are monitored on common social media, after applying sentiment analysis, an analyst specialising in Public engagement is assigned to engage with the public in order to shape the narrative.
If you or anyone else think you see this happening on HN, please send links to hn@ycombinator.com, as the site guidelines ask. If we find actual evidence of it we'll crack down hard. What we don't allow is idle speculation about it in comments, because experience has shown that that's nearly always just fantasy.
I’ll respect your “opinions” as a worker, but seriously dang. One year from now on you will be banning the very people i am complaining about now. My apologies, and have a good one.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
I've personally spent countless hours over many years poring over the data on this and I can tell you that the overwhelming majority of HN comments like yours are based on nothing more than imagination. It's extremely easy to imagine that you're seeing things and make up stories around what you think you're seeing. These stories almost never amount to anything. Even to say "almost never" is misleading—it's vanishingly rare. (Unless you count hapless voting rings from clueless startups. Those are common but they're naive abuses and not what people mean when they go on about sinister astroturfing.)
This comment was based not on imagination but an article on BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-58062630
which reports on "A sprawling network of more than 350 fake social media profiles..: HN is social media right so I don't think it's very far-fetched they would try to spread their messages also here. Here? It couldn't happen here, I hear you say.
> This comment was based not on imagination but an article on BBC
Assuming that a BBC article is describing HN is already imagination. If you think it applies to HN, I want to see specific links. Tip: look at the account histories first. Mostly it takes just a few seconds to see that $suspected-spy has been posting to HN for years about everything from Hyperloop to Rust to PyPy. I think the odds that such a user was planted as a Chinese agent in 2015 or whatever are similar to Russell's teacup orbiting the moon.
> It couldn't happen here, I hear you say
No, I'm saying that when commenters have posted such insinuations here, close study of the data has consistently shown them to be nothing more than cheap internet pontification, a.k.a. bullshit. The more flamboyant and grandiose the claims, the more fantasy-driven they prove to be. People come up with this stuff purely because they want to believe it, and will literally read anything into anything.
The problem is that such insinuations are not cost-free. They add noise, poison community, and in several cases have turned into mobs that have hounded people off HN. Hence the rule that you can't do it unless you have actual evidence. If anyone comes up with actual evidence—literally any whatsoever—we'll take it seriously and look closely into it. But someone else having an opposing view on $hot-topic doesn't count as evidence.
I know I'm sounding "flamboyant and grandiose" myself, which is not optimal, but it would take a robot not to lose patience after looking at as much of this data that I have. The truth, as far as I've been able to determine it after tons of effort, is that you guys really don't know what you're talking about. Sorry for being blunt. Here's a longer explanation from when I was in a better mood: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398725.
