See my response to the other similar comment. I definitely do what you say. It’s still an oasis in the sense that it’s much better than any alternative that I’ve found.
I’m pulling from experience at this point. I’ve picked up at least one Emacs package, for example, from an HN comment that has changed my life for the better.
Regarding the ecobee, I’ll provide another assumption that I’m working with. On the post yesterday, it was mentioned in multiple places by multiple accounts, and all mentions were received positively by the community. Here I’m assuming that the community at large is savvy when it comes to detecting blatant malicious scheming.
I guess I’m relying very heavily on the community in a way that could be manipulated, but I’ll give you some of my logic. I enjoy some of Joey Diaz’s comedy. He’s got a joke about how he likes being lied to. The context of the joke is that the lie (fake posts/comments here) actually ends up getting him what he wants (even if it wasn’t exactly what was said in the lie).
I’ve had a bad experience with the Nest thermostat and don’t want to go back. Now that I’ve started looking at the ecobee, it looks like a safe product to try instead. Even if it was lies that got me to start investigating further, it now looks to me like a reasonable decision to make.
And here I take a moment to express gratitude that I found an oasis of safe recommendations in the form of HN comments.
I discovered the ecobee thermostat in the comment section of a post about home automation yesterday. It’s nice to know (based on my assumed wisdom of HNers on these subjects) that it’s a solid product. That kind of thing has gotten to be next to impossible to produce organically with Google.