HN users flagged your comment. Open-source or not is a red herring—the issue is illegitimate promotional tactics. (I&#x27;ve replaced &quot;commercial&quot; with &quot;promotional&quot; above to make this clearer.)<p>I&#x27;m surprised that you&#x27;re not sure what I mean. From examples that users complaining about comment spam have emailed us, as well as the data I&#x27;m looking at, there is a longstanding pattern of abusing HN threads, including in outright deceptive ways: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8637324" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8637324</a>.<p>We have a contract with HN users: they&#x27;re not allowed to accuse each other of astroturfing, and we promise to crack down on actual astroturfing when we see evidence of it. I&#x27;m seeing evidence.<p>I feel bad for taking this thread further off-topic, but it&#x27;s important for users to see us upholding our end of that bargain. If you want to discuss this further, please email hn@ycombinator.com.