HackerNews has sophisticated anti-ringvoting protections, and as dang has explained many times in the past, these or other moderation systems and policies are not relaxed for YC companies; if they were, the community would lose all trust in HN [1].

Also, alleging astroturfing or shilling is explicitly against the guidelines [2]. The right thing to do if you suspect this is flag the post and email the moderators - hn@ycombinator.com.

There's a far more innocent and likely reason why Stripe gets lots of exposure here: they're in the most successful handful of companies to emerge in the past few years anywhere in the world, and people like learning about what successful companies do.

Which is not to say that it's not boring to see the same kind of content over and over, but again, the right approach is to flag and move on, not allege underhanded conduct without any evidence.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dang%20pg%20chair&sort=byPopul...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html