A more charitable interpretation is that lots of techy HN'ers would rather defend CF against an unknown company, as some sort of tribal allegiance - the same way Apple has a huge cult following. Nonetheless the end result (flagging/downranking) is wrong - hell, I had to find this thread by going to my previous comments as I couldn't find it on the front 2 pages. If that isn't considered an abuse of systems (again, charitably speaking, unintentionally), I don't know what is.