I had this debate for the last 10 years, and everytime there are persons to say "maybe this time they changed", and everytime use something like "Be careful not to dismiss anything that runs counter to your own narrative as fake".
The problem with a PR machine is that it never get tired of repeating the same story, while we do. And people eventually listen to the PR machine anyway. That's why it works. Not because it's clever, but because of human nature.
I've been watching MS for the last 23 years. So I'm not oblivious to history. ;)
And granted that's how PR works, but the problem with carrying distrust to defend against it is that is eventually makes one paranoid.
Personally, I aspire to objective reevaluation at the current point in time.
In 2018?
Microsoft historically did terrible things to open source, Balmer was an asshole about casting it as us vs them, and they still have substantial legacy OS and Office revenue streams to protect.
At the same time, their cloud business is rapidly growing, they've realized the only way to compete there is to embrace open source, and that's beginning to permeate the rest of the company. Largely via promoting someone from the dev / server / cloud business as CEO.
It doesn't have to be astroturfing. Repeatedly exposing HN readers to the same news would be a good way to gradually increase positive opinion until a desirable threshold is reached ("the first positive top comment").
Suppose it isn't more likely, that it is just random. All Microsoft has to do is pick the one article that has a positive opinion at the top and promote that one.
I won't ever really forgive MicroSoft until they give us back "Clippy".
In a marketing atmosphere dominated by Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Watson.... how can MicroSoft continue to ignore the original and much beloved assistant A.I?
Another possibility is that HN members are responding favorably to MS's recent moves.
Be careful not to dismiss anything that runs counter to your own narrative as fake. Like you said, we'll see!