
Hacker News is being hacked by marketing trolls - benkarst
I&#x27;ve been browsing this site on average, a couple of times a day for 5 or 6 years. Suffice to say, it&#x27;s not what it used to be. I have absolutely no hard data no back this up but my intuition tells me there are a many users in the tech space that are here for marketing purposes.<p>For example, I&#x27;ve noticed at least 3 times a multi-million&#x2F;multi-billion dollar sass companies releasing new features or new pricing getting 400+ upvotes. Then most of the comments gushing about how great the product is.<p>Most comments I see is shallow and opinionated as opposed to rational&#x2F;technical discussion that made Hacker News what it was.<p>It&#x27;s possible that it&#x27;s just my perception has changed not Hacker News. So I have to ask: Has anyone else noticed this or am I going cuckoo?
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slater
_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._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

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uniqueid
One thing I do notice is occasional spam in "new," but, to my delight, it
always winds up flagged before an hour has passed. This is usually the case
even with border-line posts (eg: an acceptable title like "I just found an
amazing text-editor" but a link to a lousy, crap-app text-editor). I don't
have too many complaints; HN moderation is better than any other site I know.

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atlasunshrugged
I'd say it depends what you mean by hacked - I don't disagree that many
companies see HN as another marketing channel and are trying to do the same
thing here as they would on most other channels, but I do think that HN still
has a bigger proportion of non-marketing/sales people who aren't just running
astroturf campaigns than other places

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benkarst
True, I guess as any news forum grows, you're going to have marketing trolls.
I'm just kinda disappointed that it never gets down-voted or called out in the
comments.

Maybe if more users had the right to down-vote, there wouldn't be this
problem.

