Worth noting that all sorts of entities employ people to do PR on internet forums, and redirecting and deflecting is a crucial part of their tactics.
Not saying that this is happening here, but forums need to be resilent and really focus hard on the issue at hand or be completely played by the professionals.
They don't need to be so Machiavellian. This forum is filled with Google and Facebook engineers. Some of them sincerely don't see anything bad in their companies. Others probably want to protect their stock options.
I am always amazed that being negative about Amazon is stomped out quickly in general. Just my experience where I wonder if this is by a team or they just have a lot fans.
I don't think we need to be that charitable. Seems well in line with the Amazon ethos to proactively control the narrative around them in online discussions.
I think a lot of the time this is because people aren't careful about thinking through their additional criticisms and rely on their general feeling of "I'm upset with X and this appears bad on the surface" to suffice. When people call out the obvious faults with the argument, people take it as defending the company rather than pointing out faulty assumptions (probably both).
A simple example of this is 'Google abandons products.' it's been more and less teue at different times, but it's almost always presented as a truism when the reality is more nuanced, and depends on a bunch of factors (is it a paid product, is it out of beta, do they publish a support lifetime, etc.) Google do seem to abandon a lot of stuff, but they also have a lot of stuff which can skew perceptions if you are mostly aware of certain products, and they seem to follow a sort of consistency as to how likely they are to persist.
An overly broad assertion about Google abandoning products may be met with responses like thus, even if the people responding agree that Google does it more than others. That's not defending Google because it's Google, it's adding nuance to a discussion (there are of course just defenders).
Note: I'm not trying to argue this Google criticism, it's used as an example. Even if you think this is a bad example because that's not how you see this argument usually played out, it's probably more constructive to discuss communication strategies and misunderstandings than to rehash a very played out Google criticism here more than I've done.
For me, these submissions are interesting because they surface concerns that my admittedly atypical day to day behaviors shelter me from. For instance, it takes a bit of effort to remember that for some the Facebook app is the internet, and it might be hard to understand the difference between ads and organic search results.
Ultimately though, how I engage with comments is going to be a product of my biases and opinions as an informed technical person, which in cases like this might lend support to countervailing points despite the fact that I find the primary content valuable.
I also find that I'll very frequently close the top couple of comments to look for other perspectives. That approach seems sufficient this this case.
This is outside of my area of expertise, but I wonder whether it'd be possible to train machine learning models to identify divergent threads of conversation.
Tangential conversation can be useful and constructive sometimes; but other times it'd be nice to apply a contextual overlay to a conversation which emboldens the on-topic discussion items and de-prioritizes side discussions.
It's possible to argue that that's what the HN community itself should do naturally via upvote/downvote behaviour -- but in practice there are various (often valid) reasons why an unrelated thread of commentary can become more popular than on-topic discussion.
Not saying that this is happening here, but forums need to be resilent and really focus hard on the issue at hand or be completely played by the professionals.