There is lots of support for unions in HN comments. It may even be the majority position by a slight margin. (Police unions are an inverted special case right now.)
Of course it's not a coordinated effort, any more than the pro-union comments are coordinated. This is just a classic issue on which the community is divided. The temptation to see opposing views as inauthentic and manipulated is somehow irresistible to most people on the internet. I just wrote about this in a completely different context, but the same argument applies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24356300.
This is why we have this site guideline: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
After post has been out for a while there probably is a majority in support. However every single time I read the comments of these kind of threads the first several highly upvoted comments are almost always anti-union. Its not until the post has been on the front page for a while before the comments begin to turn.
Do I have sciencily evidence? Nope. Could it be a confirmation bias or just a coincidence? Sure. However it seems to happen a lot.
You may be running into the contrarian dynamic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... If an article is about unions, the first round of objections is probably going to come from the "boo unions" contingent. Once those comments appear, a second wave of objections saying "wait a minute, unions have done good things" (or "I can't believe how anti-union these comments are!") would be expected.
I don't know for sure if that's what's happening in the threads you're talking about but it kinda sounds like it might be.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Of course it's not a coordinated effort, any more than the pro-union comments are coordinated. This is just a classic issue on which the community is divided. The temptation to see opposing views as inauthentic and manipulated is somehow irresistible to most people on the internet. I just wrote about this in a completely different context, but the same argument applies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24356300.
This is why we have this site guideline: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...