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0 pointstylerl6y ago0 comments

"Astroturfing" is a political concept. It's about making a top-down initiative appear to be a bottom-up one instead. Fake "grassroots". AstroTurf, see?

What you're talking about, as best as I can tell, is called "fanboyism" -- individual devotion characterized by unusually strong vocality and blindness to contradictory evidence.

Fanboys are extremely common in tech, but usually associated with companies that make products with particularly elegant design (Apple, Tesla) or with a strong sociopolitical component to their identity.

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dang6y ago

It's a familiar distinction. You've expressed it particularly well. We don't have the real-world information about users that would be needed to make such calls with certainty (nor would we want it!), but based on what I've seen, I don't believe it's fanboyism in this case.

More importantly, it's a distinction without a difference in cases like this. When someone is using dozens of accounts to post corporate propaganda to HN over many years, they're abusing the site and we ban them.

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