We downweight bilious comments, especially at the top of threads. Why? Because the internet tendency is to make everything ill-tempered, peevish, and gross. The spirit of this site is curiosity (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and for that to have breathing space, there needs to be an active counterweight.
The main thing to understand is that it's a global optimization, not something stupid like supporting particular PR campaigns.
There's a strong recency component to the comment ordering. New comments get a boost so they are visible enough to get upvotes if they deserve them, and over time the order settles.
It's just more signal not to use whatever they end up producing. Whether it was an astroturf campaign or they used personal connections to get HN to re-rank things, it doesn't speak well to transparency, honesty or being customer-centric. I think my original comment was a very valid criticism of vaporware and vanity blog posts used in lieu of actual product information. Trying to sweep that under the rug is not a good look.
