To be clear, this is a stealth ad for Hey email service wrapped in a rant against Google. #1 on HN 20 minutes after posting. It's quite impressive, actually.
I'm afraid your comment breaks the HN guideline against insinuation of astroturfing/shilling/etc. without evidence. It's extremely common (well over 99% of these cases) for people to see something they find incongruent, massively overinterpret it, and jump into the internet to accuse others. We don't allow that here, because it poisons discussion and community. That doesn't mean real astroturfing doesn't exist (I blasted someone for it yesterday [1]). It means that we have to have something objective to go on—and if you have that, you should be letting us know at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate.
Plenty of past explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for anyone who wants it. Here's me saying the same thing 5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9986042.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23619453, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23619595
To be very clear, my comment was intended to be complimentary, not negative. I stated it was impressive. The author's opinion about Google is totally valid and widely shared -- and that's what makes the article such a clever vehicle in which to insert a call to action on behalf of Hey. <-- no direct evidence, just my opinion, of course.
"All internet discussions of new products are content marketing" seems way overboard for me.
The article doesn't really say anything, so I can see how it being at the top would be suspicious.
Validating people's spleen is generally a good way to get to the top of the fp.