
Ask HN: How much do companies invest in swaying opinion in HN threads? - projectileboy
Given the influence of HN in the tech community, I have to believe that big players (e.g., Microsoft, Google, etc) spend at least some amount of money on PR to sway public opinion, or, at a minimum, control the damage of negative stories. But I’ve rarely seen obvious examples. Am I just blind to it, or do the moderators really succeed in controlling it?
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cbanek
I honestly don't think this happens, at least at the level of a place like HN.
It's just too small. Instead I believe they spend money trying to deal with
TechCrunch and going to the media outlets directly, to control the story, not
the comments.

On the other hand, a lot of good employees work for those companies and read
things here. They are smart people who will occasionally fight for their
company or explain why something happened, or how something isn't true,
usually in a very technical way. But I don't think any of these people are
paid PR people.

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rdlecler1
It may be small but it’s a top level hub of information flow. I see something
some up on HN to be followed days later in the mainstream press.

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cbanek
While there are some things that come up here maybe a few hours or days before
the mainstream press gets to it (usually posted from a smaller press outlet),
I've never seen an HN thread quoted or referenced here in the mainstream
media. If you've seen one, I'd love to see it.

Also, just because sometimes there are some mainstream stories here (for
example, a lot of WSJ, NYT, WaPo is posted here) doesn't mean that all stories
posted here are mainstream. Most aren't.

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relaunched
Have you ever seen a post regarding gitlab? Their CEO and team is pretty
fanatical about responding to feedback and linking to tickets they've created,
or issues they've addressed, on their website.

Additionally, I've seen several instances of engineers / product folks / etc.,
reaching out when someone has a difficult experience or lacks understanding
for why things played out the way they did.

Now, that doesn't mean that hacker news is an official customer support
channel, nor does it mean that every person that has a situation will garner
enough HN support for it to matter...but, it does happen.

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btasovac
Thank you for sharing this! We think that Hacker News community is really
important and try to engage as much as possible.

Since one of our core values is transparency, we love to share our open
issues, blog posts and links to different parts of our handbook[1].

This helps members of our community get more context on certain topics and
allows them to continue the discussion in the right place. Furthermore, when
our community knows where to express their feedback, we can use it to improve
GitLab.

[1] - [https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/](https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/)

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infra172
The thing about astroturfing is that, for every person being paid to promote
something, you have dozens of fools parotting the corporate message for free.
So, even if there were not any astroturfers on HN, the effects of their work
would still affect opinion here.

There is no way to stop it.

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dwd
There was a discussion a few weeks ago on whether Guttenberg was end of
WordPress or a new start that prompted Matt Mullenweg to comment on a few
threads.

Most HN people to their credit do seem to state if they are employed there but
it would be difficult to differentiate between a fan and an astroturfer.

Probably more difficult to moderate would be employees or PR downvoting a
critical comment rather than actually replying.

I believe there is an algorithm that picks up on crowd voting/downvoting.

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aprdm
I think you're giving way too much relevance / importance to comments in
hacker news.

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3into10power5
What examples do you have of HN crowd influencing anything these companies do
?

