Out of touch? This guy maybe, but I would be surprised if SO, like most other communities, wasn't already successfully being gamed by marketeers a hell of a lot smarter than this clown.

And let's not have the illusion that HN an pg are too smart to be manipulated by people that are at least as clever as we are but who have specialized themselves in manipulating people instead of bits and bytes.

No place where human beings gather, virtual of physical, is safe from this. It's only the clueless an lazy ones that get caught like this.

I'll bite.

"And let's not have the illusion that HN an pg are too smart to be manipulated by people..."

You're vastly underestimating how many people are interconnected in this hodgepodge of gray matter we call HN.

Blind allegiance (or antipathy) is not how things work here.

Part of the reason this community is different from others is that the best way to respect people like pg or tptacek or anyone else who's been around is to call them on something when you disagree. I think that's how they'd like it as well.

It has nothing to do with being "smarter". It's got everything to do with being genuine.

In that regard SO is at a marked disadvantage because it's such a tempting target for drive-by dropping of bait for marketing. With the exception of a handful of long time contributors, the vast number of accounts there have no discussion between each other (since that itself leads to the question getting closed) and so they have no means to get to know each other really. That's not what happens here.

You can follow people, you can read their past threads. You can even go back and watch people evolve in their thought process with the kinds of discussions we've had. Try that on SO.

> "Blind allegiance (or antipathy) is not how things work here."

You may have missed a few threads. HN has had brand/tribe/loyalty slap-fights. More than a few. And more frequently as of late.

But among which parties?

Blind allegiance and antipathy tend to bump into things frequently. The noise they cause makes them easy to spot.

There's noise in any community, but if it's the same alley cats, you learn to ignore them. I always scroll below to the end of the threads (one of the reasons I never seem to get anything done after landing on HN) to see what I've missed. The populist upvotes aren't always the most interesting and below aren't the least so as long as you follow your own rhythm, not swayed by language, it's easy to tell when someone tackles ideas than sentiment.

So you've gone from "that's not how things work here" to "if you ignore the bulk of what goes on here, you probably won't see it" ?

You're proving his point, you know.

> You're vastly underestimating how many people are interconnected in this hodgepodge of gray matter we call HN.

And you're vastly underestimating how easy astroturfing is to do, and how cheap/effective it is to implement with a captive audience (i.e. HN).

HN is being used for astroturfing according to PG.

With it's connection to YC there's a bit of it implicit in the model - e.g. YC applications.

And, no I am not finding fault with the connection to YC or the special status, just pointing out that the HN playing field is not natural grass, and that it is that way for very reasonable reasons and that it is, in my opinion, almost certainly to the benefit of the HN community.

On a site with a larger commercial tie in, "astroturfing" like "weed" in a horticultural setting lacks scientific definition.

Well to be perfectly blunt, any forum with any sort of fan base is being astro-turfed. Its the most popular robot search on Blekko ("Powered by <forum software>") and I'm sure elsewhere as well. Whether by aggressive PR firms, evil politicians, or well meaning communities trying to stop a new dump from being situated near them.

I'm certain I've come across these incidents, but the one thing they and the SO recruits will have in common is that they don't understand what makes a community[1]. That is still their biggest weakness.

Also, from what I've seen, astroturfing for ideology is far more effective than for products since often that's something the participant believes in. And it's easier to elicit emotions over ideology than products (unless we're talking programming languages, but then that's sacred ground to begin with).

[1] SO is most certainly not a "community".

I would even bet you could detect it algorithmically without having access to the server logs. It's usually pretty obvious if you're paying attention to such things. What's interesting is that successful gaming of HN usually involves genuinely interesting content. It may not be front page interesting in it's own right, but there is a lot out there that could be on the front page. Some of it just needs a little push. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

Samsung is a big (really big) company. Of course some people, especially in the marketing dept, are bound to be out of touch. It does not necessarily means no one at Samsung knows what he's doing (even marketing-wise).

They aren't really out of touch at all. They (or more specifically their marketing arms) just don't care about abusing "communities of people passionate about *" for advertising purposes.

This is really no different than stuffing your mailbox with flyers, sending you spam or having the tv people write product placement into your favorite show.

Evidently it works, which is really disappointing.