Good or bad or other, Google seems to be the only company that engages in this sort of cheerleading on HN. Does anyone else think this is a strange state of affairs?<p>If it's a new service announcement, there will be an army of people to answer questions and solve support problems. If it's a story about a competitor, there will be an army of people prodding you to try Google instead.<p>Even if this isn't an organized part of their media strategy it still smells a bit off, no?
I suspect most of the big companies do it, and brigade pretty hard. Winning tech infrastructure mindshare is inherently extremely valuable.<p>I do it for my crappy little library and I know if I had the resources of Google or Facebook... I'd use them.
I think we'd need to do some real analytics on this to see if this is true.<p>But if it is true: people hawk their stuff or promote their company on HN all the time, including on negative articles about competitors. I have no idea why you think only Google does this, because I've seen it from startups and big tech giants alike.<p>Google is a huge employer and Googlers could easily be one of the most overrepresented demographics on HN. In that light, it'd be pretty expected.