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Comment by desertraven | Hacker News Reader

The Cruise CEO is here, along with many grand stories of how good/safe their vehicles are.

I can’t help but think this thread may be a marketing ploy. If this were the case, is it allowed on HN?

Edit: In addition, any negative/challenging/sceptical comment is quickly downvoted.

HN's criterion is whether a post is intellectually interesting, or more precisely whether it can support an intellectually interesting discussion. What's nice about that is you can decide it by looking at the article itself, and the thread—you don't need to know nebulous things like the intentions behind the post. I'd say the current post clears the bar fairly easily. Here are a couple of past explanations about this, in case they're of interest:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186280

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22871601

As for negative/challenging/sceptical: that depends on the quality of the comment. Thoughtful critique is always welcome. Shallow dismissals and snark are not welcome—not that the target of the criticism always deserves better, but the community deserves better.

Thanks for the response dang. Someone below has brought to my attention that my comment doesn’t sit within within the guidelines - might it be best for me to edit it with something relevant to the article?

Out of curiosity, and regardless of this case, how do you deal with artificial manipulation of sentiment on HN?

Nudging the views of one of the most active developer communities in the world has value if you were an adversary. Do you see signs of this?

And if the campaign is sustained over a long period, with all comments/threads being within the guidelines, but heavily biased, how does one defend against it?

It would be naive to assume Reddit is the only platform that manipulates user sentiment. And despite the average user here being more capable of critical thinking, we are all still fallible. Can you speak to any of this?

I've seen dang post this link when something like this question is asked: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Their CEO is here in part because he's been with YC nearly since the beginning (he was the cofounder of Twitch and JustinTV). He's one of the first users of HN, and is definitely a long standing member of the community.

It's a marketing ploy only in the sense that they just launched public signups and wanted to let us know about it.

As someone unaffiliated, I really like that their CEO is here answering questions.

I do like that too! As long as the CEO isn't being shielded by an army of supporters.

Agreed. It is one of the things I find most attractive about HN, that Important People will actually show up in the discussion and participate.

Public, fully autonomous taxis in SF is big news regardless. Hard to imagine it not being extensively discussed here.

No need for a conspiracy. This is hackernews. Not reddit. I doubt they are spending their marketing dollars here.

Tech companies, especially software-heavy tech companies, know the value of good marketing on HN.

You're right. Perhaps they simply announced this post company-wide, so lots of happy employees are here.

By this point you're just repeatedly making insinuations about shillage and astroturfing which is in the guidelines as a thing to not do.

The motivations for my comment was seeing well-meaning comments being downvoted for no apparent reason. On the other end of the spectrum, and perhaps more importantly, someone claiming the car is so safe that they jumped out in front of it without the driver noticing, and it stopped safely. Does that, to you, seem like a responsible thing to post, even assuming it were true?

As for the breaking of rules, dang has commented, and I’ll take responsibility for my actions.

As for the breaking of rules,

You should just read them when you have a chance since they address the stuff you bring up simply and directly. Don't start meta-threads about votes. Don't accuse fellow users of shillage, brigading, astro-turfing, etc, without evidence. If you suspect abuse, email the mods. It's all in there, along with the rationale.

If it's not it should be, this is cool stuff, a little shilling on a capitalist inspired news site should be expected and I think we're smart enough to sort the BS out from the good stuff.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com