The project itself is popular, but HN allows people to talk about the fairly compelling circumstantial evidence that Asahi Lina is marcan's alter ego. Per previous discussion, they have /home/marcan and /home/lina on the same box [0], have the same hostname [1], and have similar accents and speaking patterns [2]. Marcan is free to do this, but it's completely bizarre behavior acted out in public which is now impacting the actual Asahi project. Doing v-tubing under a pseudonym is one thing, but maintaining a sockpuppet contributor on a major open source project and pretending to interact with it is a giant red flag.

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35242010

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35238601

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35238601

I don’t know what the problem is in this particular case, but from experience in some other areas getting attention on here is not universally positive. If there is something on here about a specific language feature or issue then we do see a small uptick in informed and useful discussion, but also we sometimes see a much bigger uptick in comments that are uninformed, unhelpful, or just need to get deleted.

If that happened a few times to the Asahi Linux folks I can definitely understand them wanting to block this place.

So far I have seen nothing but fawning for the project and its devs on here.