There seems to be a common cognitive bias where the sense of good faith decreases as the distance between someone else's opinion and one's own increases*. If so, then everyone has a "shill threshold": an amount of difference-of-opinion above which you will feel like the other person can't possibly be speaking honestly. When some other post exceeds my shill threshold, I will feel that there must be some sinister reason why they're posting like that (they're a shill, they're an astroturfer, they're a foreign psy-op, you name it.)

The important thing to realize is that this "shell threshold" is relative to the perceiver. It's the limit of your comfort zone, not an objective property of someone else's posts—no matter how objective it feels. It always feels objective—hence the phrase "obviously a shill".

Real manipulation and abuse also objectively exist. That is, there are two phenomena here: Phenomenon A is the cognitive bias I just described, and Phenomenon B is actual shillage, astroturfing, and what have you. The problem we face in operating this site is that Phenomenon A generates overwhelmingly more commentary than Phenomenon B. Way over 99%.

* (I bet it's nonlinear. Quadratic feels about right.)

In fact, a grifter prefers their shills to be defending them in good faith. The basic currency of a con is confidence. This is easier to wield if you don't have to pretend.

Unfortunately for moderation efforts, the test for whether or not someone is unwittingly repeating PR is not easy to moderate, or, by extension, automate the moderation of. But it is a problem of equal importance to the "bad faith" shills because the effect on the conversation is somewhere between identical and worse.

If theres no way to accuse someone of uncritically repeating the lies of, say, Apple, then you will select for people in your conversations who are unwittingly repeating the lies of Apple.

The thing is, I use linux almost exclusively, but for occasional cross platform testing in a vm.

I really dislike being called a shill just for recognizing some neat ideas.

What's more tiring for me is coming up with incessant caveats that no, i don't have anything to do with this company, no, i don't agree with everything they do but they did one cool thing here, etc etc. Make one remark about e.g. Tesla's technology without those massive caveats and a bunch of people will show up and happily hijack your thread onto a bewildering and useless tangent...

There is more that could be said here, but, really, if you take this as your default approach to analysing things you read on the internet, you'll be headed in a good direction the vast majority of the time. It's not a completely black and white thing; for instance one certainly should hold out a healthy level of skepticism if, say, the message and the speaker seem to be completely incongruous, but mostly, let ideas stand on their own.

(long sibling comment about this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851)

Exploiting possibilities and capabilities to see what can be faster, better and cheaper takes a certain degree of positive, resourceful unreasonableness that finds a way to find and connect the dots that matter.

Skepticism, cynicism and doubt worshippers who validate their beliefs by painting it on others are rarely hackers, or folks who chase the risk of creating interesting, useful or remarkable items if only momentarily.

Haters and talkers are usually busy doing nothing themselves so a culture on HN to build and share is so critically important.

If you can’t explore something with excitement knowing it mah not last and there may be a dead end, I think some of the ability to learn through passion and interest can be stifled around naysayers.

Fanboyism and chasing shiny objects has its caveats too.

Innovation just isn’t a purely logical pursuit or skill. It has creativity, emotion and other human skills that are critical to learn or miss out on at one’s own peril.