zlacker

The charitable interpretation of this comment is that Microsoft uses Hacker News comments as a barometer for developer sentiment about Azure. It’s just Microsoft trying to do the “developers developer developers!” thing. They want to make Azure into the kind of thing that people on Hacker News would like. I think this is the most reasonable interpretation, because why on earth would Satya confess to astroturfing on an earnings call?

However, if any executive is getting graded against this metric, Goodhart’s law applies, and there’s a good chance astroturfing would happen. Satya probably wouldn’t know about it.

If a Hollywood CEO says that they are trying to raise the audience Cinemascore ratings of their movies, we’d interpret that to mean that they are trying to make audience-friendly movies, not that they are trying to astroturf Cinemascore. And similarly, if someone at the studio were astroturfing Cinemascore, the CEO wouldn’t talk about it on the earnings call.

>>fshbbd+(OP)
I'm not sure about why anyone would confess, but I'm fairly certain MS used to pull this sort of stuff, and not in that sophisticated a fashion - back in the days of Windows Phone 7 and then 8, there were people all over slashdot talking about how amazing the platform was and how the developer experience was just the best... before developer builds were available.

Maybe I was misreading it, but to me at the time it seemed like a flood of unreasonably positive people gushing about something they couldn't really have had any experience with.