If you look at any of my past posts that involve discussion of famo.us you will see that I've attempted to remain as neutral as possible and always a disclaimer of my affiliation whenever I've stated an opinion that merits one.
Like you I've also been one to point out conflicts or interest or even go as far as to investigate suspicious comments on hacker news to see if there may be a conflict of interest someone should disclose. I too am a vociferous defender of the culture on HN.
If anyone can understand your concerns and suspicions, it's me. However I will vouch on the honor of all the karma I've earned as a member of this community that there was no payola involved involved in the writing of this post. Even if someone at the company were plotting to do a payola for a blog post, I would question it. At previous jobs I have prevented any several attempts to make edits to Wikipedia articles about the organization for which I worked because of the clear conflict of interest.
Lastly, if my word is not sufficient, and you are the type to require some sort of proof. I will present the following evidence that demonstrates that Byron Matto (bmatto) on HN is the kind of developer to be self motivated to promote an open-source project he believes in. On April 19, I saw that Byron was giving a lightning talk in Boston at a Javascript meetup (I check reddit, HN, meetup.com and google crawl results from the last 24hrs about once a day). I reached out to him via twitter, to see if we could be of any help [0]. To my knowledge this is the only interaction between bmatto and the company, except for may IRC conversations. I believe he might be one of the people that idle on #famous on freenode. Obviously, you may interpret this piece of evidence as proof of relation, but I hope that between my word and the acknowledgment that bmatto has, of his own volition, given back to the JS community at least once prior to any contact with the company as sufficient to suggest that your top-most voted comment may be the kind of dismissive post the likes of which PG is concerned about on HN.
Think what you will about famous after this, I just hope you can find it in you to give bmattos here a little respect as the kind of developer that maintains a blog and shares his experiences. I know I'm indebted to him and hundreds of other developers like him that take the initiative to contribute.
[0] https://twitter.com/andrewdeandrade/status/45763790543586918...
My apology to you Zelphyr since most of my comment wasn't meant to address your point. The only part that is relevant is the part about making a dismissive comment that often becomes the most upvoted comment that pg often laments brings down the quality of discourse on HN.
Lastly, FWIW, this post wasn't even submitted to HN by bmattos, but a very long-time HN member whose been on HN for 6 years and 3 months. He's got a good HN reputation and a pretty solid github profile. Hardly the kind of person who I would imagine would submit payola posts.
Source code is here: https://github.com/famous/famous
Docs are available at https://famo.us/
