I find it curious that a huge deal is made out of Microsoft's missteps with over-the-top comments being modded up and same with the articles, but similar or worse things by, say Google or Apple are simply papered over and buried.
We've banned this account for being a long-time pro-Microsoft astroturfer who has plagued this site for years, including making networks of accounts to reply to each other and create the false impression of conversation. We've banned this person or persons many times before and will do so whenever we have evidence of them plying their trade on HN. There are 76 accounts marked in our system as theirs (all banned, of course), and I'm sure they've created many more.
By the way, their bit above about how the HN community makes a 'huge deal' out of Microsoft criticisms while Google and Apple get off, etc. etc., and accusations of voting bias on HN (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11014741) —all that is highly characteristic of this person or persons. So is their use of HN not only to promote Microsoft but also to bash its competitors, something I predict you'll see if you look through the submission history of this one.
So, a call to all upstanding HNers: if in the future you see accounts that comment like that, it might be a good idea to email us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. But please don't accuse people on the site itself—that undermines civility, and shouldn't be done without strong evidence. (And let's not forget that HN has many legitimate users who use and like Microsoft products. I'm pretty sure kogir is no astroturfer.) When we do have strong evidence, we act immediately to protect the integrity of this site.
When we discovered this astroturfing campaign in 2013, and saw for how long they'd been plaguing HN, pg said that it made his blood boil. Well it makes my blood boil now.
So... where are the threads about the bugsI linked? Why were they not voted up so highly on HN? That was my only point about the story selection and how getting tech news from only HN can cause a blind spot.
HN was a community of Silicon Valley startup founders. Though because of its title, more and more nerds switched over from Reddit/Slashdot/Digg. Until early 2015 HN was mainly inhabited from Linux and MacOS people. But Microsoft invaded HN around their Build 2015 conference in May 2015. Nowadays a lot of sock puppets and fanboys with MSFT background are on HN and try to downvote everything slightly not so pretty. Nowadays "Show HN" is already a bit off-putting with cynical comments and harsh critics. HN certainly needs better voting-ring and paid sock puppet detection - hint: they are only active in certain timezones and mainly on a weekdays.
The question is what HN want to be. I visit HN for startup news and occasionally open source news. Who in the right mind would use vendor lock-in mediocre expensive licensed software for a startup? Although, I am okay with Windows 7, I hate Win8/10 with a passion because MSFT turned to a mean company again (bad ModernUI, don't care about consumer anymore at all, privacy debacle of Win10, turns everything to SaaS, evil license changes). And therefore would welcome to see less MSFT sock puppets and less FUD on HN. Remember HN used to be a group of very intelligent people, burn them once and we will remember that forever, burn them twice... you know, better stop that right now.
While I can attest that HN has always had a significant amount of startup stuff, that was nowhere near the entirety of the site.
I remember when the front page was filled entirely with Erlang articles, for example, and I'm damn sure no more than a tiny fraction of HN was using or considering Erlang for production at that time.
Do you think the above stories and comments are FUD or not?
Eventually the biased story selection by editors, circlejerk, echo chamber and biased moderation got so bad that the site pretty much died. Do we want that to happen on here as well?
>I visit HN for startup news and occasionally open source news
Then perhaps just move past the other posts you're not interested in, like the HoloLens or Open Sourcing of .NET and other libraries announcements which are definitely 'Hacker News' material.
Or spend more time on other places like /r/linux etc.
>Who in the right mind would use vendor lock-in mediocre expensive licensed software for a startup
That's totally your opinion, it works for some companies like StackOverflow.
>less FUD on HN
Can you link me to some of this FUD you're talking about?
Apple had a similar bug in Safari.
>Safari's Private Browsing Mode Saves URLs In an Easily Accessible File
http://lifehacker.com/safaris-private-browsing-mode-saves-ur...
Google had a similar bug on Chrome in Android
>Chrome for Android’s incognito mode saves some of the sites you visit
http://news.softpedia.com/news/incognito-mode-in-chrome-for-...
I find it curious that a huge deal is made out of Microsoft's missteps with over-the-top comments being modded up and same with the articles, but similar or worse things by, say Google or Apple are simply papered over and buried.
It's Slashdot all over again.