> I miss the old days of online nerds before "marketing" teams realized they can really advertise through social media and now you can't even tell what is real.

> I miss the old days of online nerds before "marketing" teams realized they can really advertise through social media and now you can't even tell what is real. Yeah, true. When I was new to HN, I had a minor altercation with some mod here because I posted a reply to a particular comment that the poster seemed to be doing paid marketing / shilling for Apple. My comment was deleted and I was reminded that as per HN community rules, I cannot accuse anyone of such things. Annoyed, I replied to the mod that it seemed obvious that the post was paid social media marketing. Someone (I don't remember if it was the mod or another fellow member of HN) pointed out that if the same logic was applied to my critical and negative posts about Apple, someone could make an argument that too was paid social media marketing by Apple's competitors. I was honestly stumped for a moment because negative campaigns are a fact too (e.g. politicians do a lot of negative campaigning through social media; the Chinese are aggressively known to do such kind of negative campaigning by posting negative reviews of their competitors product on Amazon). That said, it does happen on HN too. It would be unreasonable to expect otherwise - the kind of high net worth / IT influential crowd that comes to HN is the very market that Apple (and others) target.