I think you can make a perfectly logical and reasonable argument about why it should be fine, but in the end it doesn't matter. It will backfire because it's been abused to the nth degree in the past and now people's antennae are up.
Transparency around affiliation is key. If you're commenting something of substance, then people will appreciate it and value your comment. If you're not adding anything substantive, then it's best not to comment at all.
As a HN user, I often go straight to the comments and only look at the submission if there's an interesting discussion there. I can totally see how spammy-looking comments with an undisclosed affiliation can have the exact opposite effect.
(affiliated with Weaviate)
Do you not think that the comments in here could’ve been generated by bots?
Stop it.
For instance, Take CShorten's last two responses to threads that do not clearly identify that they are direct marketing for Weaviate.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36670548 Thanks so much for sharing!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36760269 Loved this paper - so much opportunity to explore Retrieval-Augmented Generation with these longer input LLMs + Vector Databases & Search!
Take another example of a user whose submission CShorten commented on: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=bobvanluijt
The overwhelming majority of these comments are _spam_.
If you work at Weaviate, I'd recommend you stop doing this stuff. I'm way more likely to look at a competitor who feels less like a bot network.