My “3” is Facebook opposition PR.

There’s certainly a cadence of stories that appear which seem to assert that Google’s practices are as scummy as/ equivalent to Facebook.

It feels like farming “whataboutism” and fud. That may be a coincidence, but I doubt it.

I won't get into whether they deserve it, but it's quite clear that a lot of people on HN are very happy to hate on Google, because we see lots of perfunctory, low-information comments here. It's mostly not about sharing new evidence, it's about people expressing opinions they already have.

Certain things become popular clichés, such as complaining about Go generics or Atom's alleged slowness, and so they get repeated in the comments about about that entity.

The tipping point seems to be when low-information comments start getting upvoted rather than downvoted. At some point people stop seeing anything wrong with them as long as they're on the same side.