If people didn't downvote the comments they dislike, we could know what the f... he was talking about.

I NEVER SAID IT WAS! Good grief, people. You'd think the strawman argument wouldn't get this kind of traction on HN. I had a thought that I've seen lots of announcements -- nicely timed -- along these lines over the past few months. That's it. MOST of it has come from official sources. I was just making a freaking observation, and making an inference about it. It wasn't particularly about this post at all.

Sorry for interrupting the circle jerk; I'll go back to lurking.

You can't go off like this on Hacker News after you clearly alluded to organized PR (if you didn't, then you weren't saying anything at all). To then label the rest of the interested discussion a circle-jerk is even worse. Please comment civilly and substantively here or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And now this has been flagged.

Again, for the guy who apparently mods this whole thing, and to whom I can't reply: it was a random thought, for which I've been thrashed. Super.

I absolutely alluded to organized PR; I never claimed this was part of it. The timing simply brought the idea to the foreground. I never claimed the author or the poster was a shill. It was just an unfortunate coincidence. I apologize to the internet gods for not doing a thorough background search on this particular post and vetting it so as not to imply that THIS post was part of a conspiracy, or clearly stating that this was NOT implied. The implication just didn't cross my stupid little peabrain mind. Perhaps understanding every nuance of how every single person could interpret a post is part of the terrible, implied responsibility of posting on a public forum, and I readily admit that I utter failed to do so.

By all means, sctb, if you have the power to delete my account, please do so. Because of previous examples of nonsense exactly like this, I've tried several times, but HN offers me no way to do it. So I wind up lurking, then slowly coming back, and then this sort of thing happens again. And I never seem to learn that someone, somewhere will find a reason in ANY post to be upset about it, even AFTER EXPLANATION, and either I find these people way more often than others, or I just have a harder time with the response.

I've found updating my hosts file to block sites that I'd rather not visit but find myself visiting anyway and wasting time. Maybe that would help? (Honest advice, if that's what you're looking for. If I've read your comment wrong, please ignore.)

HN purposefully doesn't delete accounts to preserve the conversations and their context. There's a comment from pg around here to that effect.

Edit: here it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6813226

Yeah, I get why they don't delete. It does make a mess of Reddit threads. And I've thought maybe even DNS-black-holing. But whatever I do, I know I'll just eventually turn it off again. :-/