It more than "looks bad", it actively stifles conversation and keeps it at probably around the "ad hominem" tier of disagreement (http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html).

I think even if you were to present statistics of some kind, some people might not consider it enough and ask for some different contrived set, on and on, forever.

If you think something's really wrong, you email the mods about it. Otherwise you get in this exact meta-discussion land about what is astroturfing, what are accusations, and so on. And then you get threads that distract from meaningful conversations, on and on, forever.

Maybe we could all just try to discuss the article and related comments by refuting/agreeing with their central points. It would be less boring than seeing the same metadiscussion and flailing forever.

(In that vein, I won't be replying to this comment further)

edit: for those left wanting, take a look at the words of 'dang: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20astroturfing&sort=by...