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Comment by crumbshot | Hacker News Reader

Is HN being subjected to some astroturf marketing techniques here?

Seems rather suspicious to see so many commenters enthusiastically salivating over an advert for a very expensive radio.

And also for said advert to hit the #1 spot on this site, despite not fitting into the usual categories for a compelling post.

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Yes you caught me! After accumulating nearly 48k in Karma I finally sprung my marketing trap on the unsuspecting HN crowd with this post of mine!

Actually just a huge fan and having owned 2 OP-1's, I'm just a big fan of Teenage Engineering.

It's ok that you are not privy to the hype around Teenage Engineering in general.

Musicians like their devices because the UX design is interesting and relatively smooth, and the devices have a lot of flexibility for making interesting music.

The musician love for TE is on the wane as the company pivots from doing innovative industrial design for creative people to becoming another pointless luxury brand. They sell a $170 blank sweatshirt now.

HN is fundamentally a community built around products and commodities (and especially tech startups). What discussion happens here about programming is a very market-centric view of the field. This post seems par for the course to me.

TE made one really stand-out product, the OP-1, and one kinda-pretty-good product, the OP-Z. They have a few other products of mixed reception and a bunch of typical high-end boutique junk if you really want their logo on your t-shirt or whatever. They're coasting on their reputation of the OP-1, which is deserved, but they haven't really come up with anything worthy of their reputation since.

I think the Pocket Operator PO-33 KO stands out too.

"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."

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

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

Teenage Engineering is the Apple of music gear. People who like their stuff, REALLY like their stuff.

The real explanation might actually be that a lot of people on hacker news are easily taken in by marketing. A new look for something that was popular when people were kids at a 1000% markup should be easy to see through, but stuff like this happens all the time.

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

b) It's an expensive tech gadget, these are discussed here all the time?

I was thinking the same thing. How does this overpriced niche speaker make it to the top of hn so quickly?

people upvote it because they think it's cool. That's how the system works.

That's how the system should work. But it isn't always the case real people are upvoting.

there's literally no evidence that such a thing is happening.

HN is always subject to astroturfing, it's just generally managed by YC directly. Ensuring positive opinion and adoption of their investments while keeping the competition soundly off the radar.

No, that's not the case. We do have Launch HNs for YC startups that get special treatment (one of three formal things that HN gives back to YC, the other two being job ads and displaying alumni usernames in orange). This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. But those formal things aren't really the main value that HN has for YC. I've written about this lots of times: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you look at those explanations, you'll understand why we don't manipulate HN in the way you suggest. The good faith of the community is worth far more than anything we'd get by squeezing the lemon that way. Besides which, it would be wrong.

There are also lots of explanations about how we moderate threads involving YC or YC startups: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

I'm with you. This is a product for rich narcissists.

rich narcissists??? on HN?! the shock!! the surprise!!!1!

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