>> Under the assumption that amazon has decided to astroturf on this niche tech news site

Even Microsoft astroturfs here...

Satya Nadella, Microsoft FY2019 Q1 earnings call [1]:

“In fact, this morning, I was reading a news article in Hacker News, which is a community where we have been working hard to make sure that Azure is growing in popularity and I was pleasantly surprised to see that we have made a lot of progress..."

[1] - https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2018/10/24/mi...