You guys should be up-front about your astroturfing both here and on WikiPedia.

Wienke = CEO of the company.

Posting ones own content is not astroturfing unless they try to hide that it was them.

The submitter is a low karma anonymous account that just so happens to match the last name of the CEO of the company, so it isn't disclosed. Also this shot up on the 'new' page suggesting more than one company vote, this isn't the first time this happens with that particular domain either.

Similar stuff is happening on Wikipedia, read the talk page there (and the LoRa page) to see what I'm getting at.

Are comments really the best place to hash this out?

Why not just flag and move on.

People don't need to disclose who they are when submitting things to HN.

Hell, I used to have a pretty comprehensive bio, until I replaced it with an icloud relay email because random internet people would look me up outside HN and try to dig up stuff to use as ammo in response to comments I posted that they disagreed with.

HN can be a nasty place. I don't fault anyone for hiding their identity.

> People don't need to disclose who they are when submitting things to HN.

Companies aren't people. That's one of those things I just don't subscribe to. If you are the CEO of a company and you are engaging in what can only be termed as marketing activities, effectively advertising your company I think you should be up front about that. Otherwise you can no longer see the difference between organic interest in a technology and marketing push, which are two entirely different things.

Maybe I’m not appreciating your viewpoint because the article nor the comments seem overtly self-promoting to me.

I would agree with you if it was a garbage press release with low quality fake comments.

Maybe there’s some niche politics that I’m unaware of in the LoRa space that is triggering.

> Maybe I’m not appreciating your viewpoint because the article nor the comments seem overtly self-promoting to me.

And maybe I'm over protective of HN.

> I would agree with you if it was a garbage press release with low quality fake comments.

You mean like the one where the CEO (then still anonymously) tried to devalue a point made by a commenter here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37416457

> Maybe there’s some niche politics that I’m unaware of in the LoRa space that is triggering.

Not that I'm aware of, but their WP talk page is pretty clear about them abusing WP for marketing purposes and that doesn't give them the benefit of the doubt with me when interacting with HN in this way, besides that the initial votes were so fast that I doubt that it was organic. But when dang wakes up I'm sure he'll be able to rule that out or confirm it. For all I know it is all legit but it certainly looked weird. Also note how the CTO nicely disclosed who he was but the CEO did not well after joining the thread until prompted to do so. Which makes me suspect this is a bit more organized than it may seem at first glance, but then again, that's not my call to make.

If he had used another "anonymous" name I might've agree that it could border astro-turfing but if your handled matches your last-name it's probably more of an over-eager CEO that thinks the world revolves around his ideas and interests (Being the company at the moment), so I'd rather put it in the spammy-behaviour box (But that seems accepted to a certain extent here still for obvious reasons).

Jacques’ point is spot-on, regardless of your fine distinction to call it spam instead of astroturfing

If the content is good and nobody is hiding their affiliation with it then the correct word is just "posting". Otherwise it might fit within one of the categories you mentioned.

I agree that it would be better if they were up front with their affiliation, but hiding it (astroturfing) is not the same as not divulging.

It's the combination of company URL, posted by a company person, commented on by another company person pushing questions (i.e. generate engagement) that seemed weird, and feels orchestrated.

It's well possible that this was really an innocent accident, but it would have looked better if something like this engagement post was posted by the same account as the original link.

Sorry, I am here in all transparency. Not really hard to find out though as my first name and TTN are quite a unique pair.

Nobody would suspect that a low karma anonymous account posting a link is the CEO of the company. Not buying it.

You guys have nice tech but this isn't the way to go about promoting it.

Suggestion: update your profile, change the title to 'Show HN' and clearly disclose your affiliation.

Ah thanks for the education. I updated my profile. Will try to gain more karma to gain more respect.

That's not what the karma mention was about, it basically means that you are not likely to be known here, that's all.

But fair enough, thanks for the profile update.

I think I don't know 99% of the CEOs posting here, and I also don't need to? In the end similarly as any other employee posting for his company, and disclosure in the post is just fine? Don't get it.

HN is weird in that there is a format for that, which, as a relatively new entrant you may not be aware of, but that's what 'Show HN' is for, so that you know that whoever is posting something is associated with the article. Otherwise you will get to the point where HN is just another advertising medium, only with the ads not labelled as ads.

Is that written somewhere? Maybe just different understandings and expectations.. but for me "Show HN" is about here is my work/project I'm proud of, want to share with the rest of the world, want to have it discussed. For a normal news, even if you are the author of submitting, not sure if that's necessary. "Show HN" is imo not the anti-astroturfing disclosure, and for my expectations I would actually be a bit surprised and sad if a "Show HN" here would have lead me to just this little announcement, and maybe even downvote it :)

Yes, that's written somewhere but I'm not going to quite from private correspondence. I was recently corrected when I mentioned that Show HN is for projects rather than for companies and apparently it is for companies as well. As you can see by clicking the 'Show' link at the top of the page.

First sentence

> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread

Feels like it fits exactly my understanding? Not company vs person/project, but press release/announcement vs something to play with, something easily accessible and tryable, detailed?? And it goes much further that it must be something like this.. and no mention at all that this is the necessary disclosure if this is your article, newsletter or similar.... this one here definitely not a "Show HN"!

So people that are not known here have nothing interesting to share? Recipe for an echo chamber.

That's not what I meant and I suspect you are well aware of that.

I guess what they’re trying to say is that if you were well known you might not need to disclose it because people would already know?

I agree with Jacques here. You have nice tech, please don't ruin it with shady "marketing" tactics. Openness and honesty is appreciated!

I read astroturfing as astrosurfing and thought this was the name for bouncing the signal off the moon.

Now that's neat, you get to claim to have invented a new word!

But the original name for that is EME for Earth-Moon-Earth. Radio amateurs have been doing this for decades, it's a fun thing to try.

This seems bizarre to me, as this isn't astroturfing at all - it's a marketing post on the official company blog! There's no suggestion whatsoever that this is coming from raw grassroots enthusiasm. This is clearly marketing content directly from the business itself.

To be clear, that's fine! This is definitely interesting content, and companies with genuinely interesting things to share should share them directly, that's great. I can't speak for the wikipedia behaviour, but I think complaining about this post is unreasonable.

Posted to HN, by an account that isn't clearly affiliated with the content, most likely upvotes by a bunch of company people, and from a company that has a history of using public resources like marketing channels.

As for whether or not this is fine: yes, it's fine. "Show HN: We reached a new RF distance record with LoRa" from an account associated with the company.

> 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 [email protected] and we'll look at the data.

Yes, I'm aware of that but: in this case it's plain obvious.

"Plain obvious" is an argument that it's not astroturfing.

It's a link to a blog on the company site, linked by someone whose profile clearly discloses they're CEO of the company.

So, in your opinion plain obvious astroturfing can never be astroturfing?

It's obvious to me because (1) I'm aware of the company, (2) know that there have been issues with their WP entries in the past (and still are, they are essentially marketing copy), and finally (3) because it just so happens that the company is Dutch and I keep an eye on the local eco-system. But it probably wasn't that obvious to you.

These guys have nice tech, but they are working the web in a way that doesn't sit right with me. If you're ok with this then no problem, let's see how you feel when HN and WP are overrun by advertising that masquerades as organic postings.

Correct. I don't think the CEO of Y can ever say "I'm the CEO of Y and here's a link to a blog on Y company website about something related to Y company that I think is worth sharing here" and have it be astro-turfing for Y. It might be advertising or even spamming. It might become too frequent or annoying or otherwise negative.

I follow TTN (and Helium), have a TTN gateway plugged in, and a dozen or so LoRa dev boards sitting around (two are within reach, albeit buried under some dust of recent disuse).

I find the LoRa tech interesting in general and a new RF distance record specifically interesting, whether it's on the TTN blog, the Helium site, on an Andreas Spiess video, or elsewhere. It sounds like you have some relevant history with the company's behavior that is shaping your opinion of their action here. We perceive their action here differently as a result.

But that's the point: they didn't say they were CEO of Y. If you didn't happen to know the name of the CEO and match that to the HN handle there is absolutely nothing either on that page, nor was there in the CEO's HN bio to advise you of those facts.

And that's now fixed for everyone else, possibly directly as a result of your noting it.

Yes, it was.

I've just disconnected a BobCat miner so I have a spare 1.1m 8.5dBi 868MHz antenna on my roof. Can you recommend a good gateway to get started on TTN?

Recently somebody created this guide to turn your Helium gateway (running on a RPi) to a TTN gateway: https://medium.com/@friedkiwi/repurposing-helium-iot-hotspot...

A CTO that doesn't understand RF and has been working with it for 8 years? <surprised Pikachu face>

To some extent it's statistics. Send enough messages and the odds are one will eventually get though.

> providing a standardized and objective measure of the technology's capabilities

Not really. The environment is still variable. A short message could have bounced off some random short duration reflector somewhere (aeroplane, meteor, lightning, ...) or have been refracted by some short term effect. Standardised and objective is an anechoic chamber or a cabled in attenuators/channel simulator.

Yes, this is an outlier and it took around 8 years for this to be emerge and be detected by the community run TTN mapper initiative. The main fun thing about this is more that it shows how cool it is to have a global community network where we enjoy sending messages for the sake of it just to learn technology. Like kids with 2 cans and a string between them.

Hi. Cool work. For this particular record, could you confirm that this was on 868MHz?

Yes, this was 868MHz