Critical comments on this thread are receiving an unusual amount of downvotes in my opinion.
You broke the site guidelines badly with this, as did everyone who upvoted it. Please read the rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. They contain:
"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."
We have that rule for good reason, as I've explained ad nauseum over many years:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
including yesterday:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27271356
I looked at the data and saw no evidence that the comments are astroturfed, let alone "af". Perhaps I'm missing the obvious? In that case these astroturfers must be devilishly clever—enough not to leave any of the traces that we look for—and also dumb enough to leave comments that readers will pick out as obviously astroturfed.
More likely, though, you were doing what internet users commonly do, which is vastly over-weight the things they dislike and then read sinister interpretations into them. (See https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... for many past explanations.) The overwhelming majority of these interpretations have literally zero evidence, and they're deeply poisonous to forum threads. In the future, if you don't have evidence, please don't post any of these; and if you do have evidence, please email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it. But people having different tastes in game engines does not count as evidence.
Your edit is still not in keeping though, because if you read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html to the second-last rule, you'll find: Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Moreover, from what I've looked at in this thread, your comment appears to be false. Which critical comments are you talking about specifically?
> In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress in some sense that at least basically said that we are neck to neck with Amazon when it comes to even lead developers as represented in that community. So we have more work to do, but we are making progress on all dimensions.
https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/microsoft-corp-msft-q1-201...
EDIT: I don't mean this to be an indictment of the moderation on HN - on the contrary, I think an amazing job is done to balance out this stuff. It's just crazy to realize that corporate efforts on HN are important enough to mention on an earnings call!
Everyone knows this happens on any forum with sufficient popularity, but it's striking to see it openly admitted.
I suppose it is. It'd be more shocking if companies weren't shilling on these platforms. I have to admit I haven't been countering this with upvotes on my part, which is a fairly simple solution.
In retrospect astroturfing [0] is not the appropriate term, previous discussion on that here [1].
Shilling on the other hand is the correct term - but there doesn't appear to be a meaningful way to distinguish between paid and unpaid shills as an observer.
Perhaps my comment should've been more along the lines of "there are dissenting voices that have been buried," which on Reddit would be a callout that says "sort by controversial". Unfortunately, neither is useful for comments that aren't top-level.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19418177