I've often assumed HN is brigaded by some of the larger corporations. Whenever there is a negative article about google, the comment sections seem to fill with glowing reviews and whataboutsisms. During the Roku Google battle, the comment sections were chock full of the same critique of rokue over and over again. It seemed fairly obvious there.
Yea, I have no idea what the reasons are, that could totally be a factor. It's not a super high-quality commenter community, but the vote patterns are more bizarre than a lot of decidedly lower-quality fora, so there are clearly other factors.
I just assume that's what's going on here.