> It's beyond suspicious that 4 newly created users all have positive experience with PJON and only posted on this submission.

I will freely admit that I am, quite often, overly suspicious when there's a bunch of "green" users commenting (overwhelmingly positive) on a Show HN thread too -- especially when there's any money potentially involved (i.e., a product for sale, seemingly "technical" blog posts which are, in reality, just carefully prepared sales/marketing material, and so on) [0]. To be quite honest, I'm overly suspicious of damn near everything and I particularly despise "spam" of any kind [1].

In this case, though, I don't think there's anything dishonest going on, though [2].

The project has been around for about a decade and there's obviously a community behind it. I only spent about 20 minutes exploring the web site and Git repo and while I don't recall seeing any obvious links to a mailing list, message board, or IRC channel, I'm sure the project has someplace where they "hang out" and collaborate.

To me, at least, it's quite easy to imagine that the founder of the project -- the same person who posted this Show HN, AFAICT -- may have told the PJON community "Hey everyone, I just posted a link PJON to HN; here's the URL if anyone wants to join the discussion ..." or something else similar to that. I don't know whether something like happened here or whether the PJON users who just created their HN accounts to comment in this thread discovered it via some other means. I do think that there are several possible explanations that are more likely than all of them being (paid) shills for a piece of software that's both free as in speech and free as in beer [3].

Personally, my own smell test considers things like "what's being promoted?", "what's the real benefit/goal of posting this here?", and, of course, "who benefits from this and in what ways?".

As I said before, I don't have any doubt that there's an ulterior motive here -- the goal seems to simply be to share and promote an ~10 year old open source implementation of an open network protocol that 1) is exactly the type of thing that's generally of interest to HN'ers, 2) was founded on ideals and principles that many of us here on HN share and believe in (autonomy/self-hosting/decentralization), and 3) has (verifiably) been used, successfully, in the real world.

Besides, HN guidelines implore us all to extend the benefit of the doubt. Blatant, obvious "violations" should obviously be pointed out -- but this isn't one of them.

In fact, this project is EXACTLY the type of project that belongs on HN. It's a damn shame that it's now "[flagged]"!

It's almost as if "somebody" doesn't want projects like this one to succeed. Who would benefit if PJON and others like it didn't exist? Who would benefit if users instead had no other option but to pay a for-profit company for the hardware, software, and (of course!) the recurring monthly subscription fee instead of just doing it themselves? Hmm... (see how easy that is)?

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[0] Hell, I get annoyed when User A posts a "Show HN" for their new project and then User X (and, sometimes, User Y and User Z) takes advantage of the "opportunity" to post a "This is similar to $foo, $URL, which is an [app|company|service] that also does $thing" comment in the thread ("Submit your own Show HN, then!" is what I want to say!). Bonus points to those who somehow manage to work in a reference to their own product/service even when the two have only the most minimal of commonalities or similarities ("Interesting. Our service, $bar, is also a web site" is only a slight exaggeration).

[1]: Spam doesn't just arrive via e-mail. To me, "spam" is rather loosely defined and includes any unsolicited and/or unwanted sales/marketing/promotional material (or similar) and, in some cases, even includes anything "off-topic" (depending on the forum, usually).

[2]: My HN account is only ~8 years old and I only lurked for a few years before I finally decided to devote the time, effort, and energy necessary to create an account. I'm not sure if that's long enough to pass your "shill test" or not; If necessary, I would sign a sworn affidavit attesting that I had never even heard of PJON before today but, then again, that's just the kind of thing a shill would say!

[3]: It's available under the Apache license.