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Comment by ashton314 | Hacker News Reader

MS is getting desperate. This shill [^1] had the audacity to reply to a tweet I made praising the very excellent FOSS Zotero bibliography manager with a suggestion to use Edge. Like, come on. Amusingly, Twitter initially hid his tweet with "Tweet may contain offensive material." Offensive to a FOSS-loving mind indeed.

[^1]: https://twitter.com/varadarajans

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Pedantic musing:

> Shill

> One who poses as a satisfied customer or an enthusiastic gambler to dupe bystanders into participating in a swindle.

Is it "shilling" if you're a project manager recommending your product? He doesn't appear to be posing as anything other than a Microsoft employee working on the Edge team.

Now I am interested to learn how would you describe it!

You've missed the 2nd definition of shill:

shill verb: 2 : to act as a spokesperson or promoter "the eminent Shakespearean producer … is now shilling for a brokerage house" — Andy Rooney

shill noun: 1b : one who makes a sales pitch or serves as a promoter

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shill

If you're going to choose to be pedantic, it helps to read the entire definition, and not just paste in the top result from DDG's "define shill"

Pretty sure that to be a shill, your relationship to the thing being promoted has to be hidden. We don't refer to marketing folks as shills. Parasites maybe, badum-ching.

I refer to anyone trying to get me to use a particular product as "shilling", including marketing folks.

If you're just injecting yourself and your product into other peoples conversations without invitation, then you are probably shilling.

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