HN users need to stop accusing their opponents in arguments of being astroturfers. Astroturfing may or may not exist, but sincere disagreement is common. It degrades the discourse badly when sincere disagreers are accused of being shills.
It's not that astroturfing isn't a problem. It's that the collateral damage of firing off such accusations indiscriminately is too great for that to be ok without evidence. People disagreeing with you isn't evidence.
If you suspect astroturfing in an HN thread, please email us at hn@ycombinator.com. Cracking down on that is part of our job. We will take your suspicions seriously. But we will do so by looking at actual data—something that isn't an option in the HN threads themselves and would mostly be off-topic there.
Within the threads, the HN guidelines and Principle of Charity [1] require you to assume that disagreers are arguing in good faith, and to deal with them not by calling names but by making better arguments.