Hacker News Reader

Comment by talmand | Hacker News Reader

It must be rough living in your world of every positive review is by a paid shill.

To be fair, it's a common business practice now to shill your products. In order to keep one's beliefs consistent with reality, one has to assume that some Internet comments are made by shills. To assume that shills don't exist is self-deception.

Not saying that it's valid to assume a shill in this case, but my point is that American consumers don't have enough information to determine whether a product review is genuine.

Apparently, he/she is not aware of the fact that tech companies hire people, most likely techies in product evangelism related roles, to publicize their offering and also to counter bad publicity/press offering different narratives and talking points like any regular PR operation out there.

Some are good at it and can conceal their true intentions and some are not really good.

It was especially clever of them to register this account years ago, before Ghost was even invented, and pad the account with years' worth of comments to hide their obviousness.

If someone has an old account that doesn't preclude them from getting hired by other people and to be instructed by their new employer t0 use the account in promotional activities.

I am not talking about this particular person here, I'm just talking in general and in principle.

Ghost's finances are open, which has spurred the inception of this conversation.

If they're paying people off to be shills, they're definitely not paying worthwhile sums.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com