It looks legit to me. Keep in mind that the earliest comments to appear in a thread are often the reflexive ones, because they take the least effort (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). In this case there isn't much to reflexively react negatively to, so there are a lot of congratulations.

I think this post is doing well because it combines two things that HN readers like a lot: (1) business success stories, as long as the succeeder is someone the reader identifies with; (2) all things meta. Meta is the crack of internet forums. Oh, and a runner-up: (3) references to old things. The passage of time is what confers internet legitimacy on things. So here we have a trifecta.

There isn't massive overlap between the congratulatory commenters and the users who upvoted the submission, and among those who did both, plenty are long-established HN users. This is not what manipulation tends to look like.

Those are some good points. As i said in another post, i have probably become a little too cynical after working in the field for so long - so congratulations to these dudes.

Because there isn't much to say other than congratulations and at the same time it's nice to upvote such a post for feel good reasons and to showcase things that have been born out of this community.

It's pretty cool to see something get launched here and have the founder come back TEN YEARS LATER to talk about it. That's crazy rare. HN was a little smaller then, so it's fun to see names you haven't seen in awhile talking about the same stuff as before.

From the guidelines -

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data.

No offense but your account was created 18 days ago. Something seems very weird about this post.

Please don't do this here. Plenty of new accounts are old users.

Yet your was only created 64 and has less post activity than the account you're responding to. Should we read too much into that?

HN don't let majority of the users downvote, that's what's going on.

There's nothing wrong with empty comments saying positive things like congratulations. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html, which was written well over 10 years ago.

It's not as if stories like this come up very often.

This whole thread is a little bonkers. A dude posts what seems to be essentially a commercial for his company, extremely short and light on details and it gets 500+ upvotes in a couple of hours. But yeah maybe i have just become to cynical and my bullshit metre is off - and if that's the case i apologise and congratulate these dudes.

For what it's worth, I tend to upvote most "Show HN" threads, because I want to encourage new things. I've never seen a "Thank HN" post before, and thought that it was worth upvoting because it's nice to see success stories, especially when it's due in large part (according to the OP) on the advice given by this community when the product was in its infancy. I thought that was pretty cool.

Love this guy's story. Wouldn't downvote it for anything. Let's all be nice and say "you're welcome - keep kicking ass".

I'd have agreed until I inspected the guy's business and it looks very established. 10 years old. 1 million visits in the last 3 months according to similarweb and nothing really suspicious if you look up his company in hn.algolia.com. Your comment is kinda paranoid but I understand it. Just try to look up the algolia website if you're suspicious of any company's activity.

youre new, this is a YC classic

That's not accurate, and this comment breaks the site guidelines against making accusations of astroturfing and manipulation without evidence. Please stick to the rules when commenting here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

It's not ok to impugn someone's integrity just because of how something happens to look to you. The overwhelming majority of the time, these conclusions are wrong, it's the internet's fault for jumping to them, and they poison the community.

Real abuse exists, we do a lot to try to counteract it, and we crack down pretty hard when we find it. But there needs to be something objective to go on.

LOL whatever you say dude just flag me but don't insult my intelligence xD

I've spent countless hours poring over data and working on HN's anti-abuse systems—easily an order of magnitude more than everybody else put together who's worked on those things at HN. I've also banned many accounts for doing astroturfing and related abuses on HN. I can tell you that the only insult to intelligence here is when people imagine sinister scenarios out of a few data points and rush to comment threads to complain darkly and accuse others. Randomness plus cognitive bias equals narrative, and when that combines with internet memes like astroturfers-under-every-bed, the result is equal parts poisonous and stupid, which is why we don't allow it here. The overwhelming majority of these insinuations are pure projection. People simply make this shit up when they see something they don't like. It seems related to something hard-wired.

Edit: by the way, it occurs to me that one of the things you said ought to be publicly verifiable: "just look at the comment history on those accounts -- all inactive/active at around the same time". If so—which accounts? If you didn't simply make this up, it should be easy enough to point to which comments and accounts match this claim, from around the time you posted it. If I'm wrong, I'd be happy to admit the mistake and correct it.

Just to be clear, no one is denigrating your good work holding this community together, it's not an easy job, granted, and we appreciate the time it takes to do so.

There are also no "dark thoughts" or sinister plots at play here. I was simply replying to OP who posed the curious question about how this thread evolved so quickly, and I as the cat, got killed.

However, we should both know by now that "anti-abuse" and AI/Algos only get you so far, we still need human moderation, and that was what I was doing -- using my brain to see patterns xD

I don't know what you want me to prove here, I don't have the data, I don't have timeseries metadata of posts or IPs etc. -- but it shouldn't take a genius to pick out at least a dozen early comments that had no comment history for >30 days and then all decided to comment at the same time on the same thread. Couple that with a thread subject that didn't really have anything of value (read: promotional) and it's quick rise to the #2 spot -- the conclusion I came to was that it was being brigaded/spammed/seeded/call-it-what-you-want.

This was all that I was trying pointing out, sorry if wasn't appropriate.

> just look at the comment history on those accounts -- all inactive/active at around the same time.

What are you talking about? I just went through about half the accounts that have commented on here, and while a small handful do look suspicious, most are normal-looking accounts with over 100 rep. Maybe people are genuinely happy for the OP? Is that so hard to comprehend?

> and while a small handful do look suspicious

Isn't that not what we're talking about? Maybe you weren't around to see all the "Congrats" comments and now the thread looks more legit -- I believe we call that "seeding", what do you call it?

Since there are 250 people at the company, maybe they all wanted to congratulate their CEO and some didn't have accounts yet.

That fits a few of the data points but not the majority, who are established users coming from lots of different parts of the world.

HN mods. This looks very sketchy. I looked at a some of the Congrats messages and the accounts were 3-20 days old. Why is this on the front page of HN to merit a discussion?