It's against the site guidelines to insinuate astroturfing or shillage like this - if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it.

The reason is that the overwhelming majority of such perceptions turn out not to have any evidence behind them, and meanwhile it's one of the things that internet commenters do that most degrades discussion.

I wrote a much longer explanation about this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35932851. There are lots of other past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... if anyone wants more.