Comment by pm215

6 years ago

I feel that HN somewhat does the 'factoring into smaller groups' by having each topic's conversation be pretty clearly separated from each other one's, and quickly expiring off the frontpage. So the group of people who actually have a conversation in any given comment page is much smaller than tens-of-thousands.

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pm215

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virtue3  6 years ago

During the onset of COVID there were a lot of people jumping to Amazon's defense of their warehouses. With seemingly deep information about changes there.

Could have been just amazon employees, might not have been.

I feel similarly about how the discussion goes when people slam Apple.

Are these infiltrators? Or do we have a lot of Amazon and Apple employees? Do developers usually care that much to protect their company online? (I've never been in that situation so I can't say).

  • dang  6 years ago

    These perceptions are extremely easy to imagine based on seeming patterns that usually boil down to nothing when we look at the data. That's why the site guidelines ask people not to post insinuations of infiltration, astroturfing, shillage, etc., at least if there's nothing concrete to go on.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

    https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

    It's natural for people to post about what they know about from work, and they're naturally biased in favor of their employer, so that's a thing. Even more of a thing is just that each $bigco has both a fanbase and a foebase, and the two of them go at it in every $bigco-related thread.