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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't it seem to anyone else that there's more than a little astroturfing going on here?

Many positive commenters in this thread have 1 karma and no other posts, and this link has shown up in no less than 3 front page links as of this writing.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2354776 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2354830 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2355091

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The Envy Labs folks behind it have been highly active in the Rails/screencasting community for a while now, producing a wealth of free content. It doesn't seem in their nature to astroturf.

The site is fresh and unique in its teaching approach. I think this will get plenty of good press all by itself without them helping it along through questionable measures.

FWIW, no "astroturfing" from me. I got the e-mail that they launched and submitted the URL, because I've been looking forward to taking a look at it (didn't get a beta invite). Haven't used it much yet, but I like the concept, and to me the execution looks promising.

While we want this to be a huge success, we wouldn't stoop to astroturfing. A little extra traffic today isn't worth soiling the great reputations of the companies and people involved.

I agree that three stories on the front page seems unusual, but two have slid down now.

I'm completely unrelated to it, however I did go through the excellent rails for zombies tutorial, and was wowed how much it got across in so little time. I bought the next rails module sight unseen as I'm sure it has at least 1/2 the high quality RFZ did.

No astroturfing. I genuinely think this is an awesome product. I completed Rails for Zombies when it came out and was blown away. When I heard about Code School I asked for a beta invite and I did Rails Best Practices and similarly loved it. I wanted to blog about it ASAP.

I emailed Gregg and asked if I could have some beta invites to share with my blog readers for my post. He told me to hold off as they were just about ready to launch and didn't need anymore beta testers but that he would ping me on launch, which he did.

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